Lacerda Machado Quotes

Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it. ~ Antonio Machado

When I was in my 20s, I used to go crazy. I used to work out two or three hours a day, like cycling; I was never anorexic, just picky. When I was in my 30s, I'd go back and forth, now that I'm 41, I'm like, 'Whatever, man!' For the most part, I just do a regular workout. ~ Justina Machado

There are a lot of doubts over the size and effect of new competitors in the cellular sector. ~ Antonio Machado

To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. ~ Machado De Assis

Cotrim, who was present, said:
"Those came who had a genuine interest in you and in us. The eighty would have come only as a formality, would have talked about the inertia of the government, about patent medicines, about the price of real estate, or about each other…"
Damasceno listened in silence, shook his head again, and sighed:
"But they should have at least come. ~ Machado De Assis

It is hard to know if what you are going to do in life is up to you, or a sum of the contribution of others, plus the circumstances you are born into. ~ Carlos Machado

Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can't help but respond to that state. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Prometheus. The truth unknown to man is the madness of him who proclaims it. Proceed, and have done. ~ Machado De Assis

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being. ~ Antonio Machado

Why do we teach girls their perspectives are inherently untrustworthy?" I would yell. I want to reclaim these word. After all, melodrama comes from melos, which means music, honey. A drama queen is nonetheless a queen. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I wonder if it is harder for a woman who was beautiful to get older or a woman who was never looked at. ~ China Machado

Observe now with what skill, with what art, I make the biggest transition in this book. Observe: my delirium began in the presence of Virgilia; Virigilia was the great sin of my youth; there is no youth without childhood; childhood presupposes birth; and so we arrive, effortlessly, at October 20, 1805, the date of my birth. ~ Machado De Assis

We dream of the perfect wave, the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect love, and when we get there, we dream of something else, and the journey goes on. ~ Rob Machado

Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms. ~ Machado De Assis

My soul is not asleep. It is awake, wide awake. It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its eyes wide open far-off things, and listens at the shores of the great silence. ~ Antonio Machado

He was happy because, after such a long study, experimentation, and struggle, he could at last affirm the ultimate truth: there never were and never would be any madmen in Itaguai or anywhere else. ~ Machado De Assis

Originally a stylist took terrible dresses and did everything she could to make them wonderful. Now, you create an image. It's much more specialized. ~ China Machado

Like an abandoned dog who cannot find
a smell or a track and roams
along the roads, with no road, like
the child who in a night of the fair
gets lost among the crowd,
and the air is dusty, and the candles
fluttering,
astounded, his heart
weighed down by music and by pain;
that's how I am, drunk, sad by nature,
a mad and lunar guitarist, a poet,
and an ordinary man lost in dreams,
searching constantly for God among the mists. ~ Antonio Machado

The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species. ~ Machado De Assis

The moral of that story, I think, is that being poor will kill you. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I took a step toward her. "It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right," I said. "It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them." The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. "You may think that I have an obligation to you but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall ...
And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry. ~ Machado De Assis

He discriminated against neither the avaricious nor the prodigal: both were committed to the asylum; this led people to say that the alienist's concept of madness included practically everybody. ~ Machado De Assis

Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I would like to continue making music and acting in projects that give me a lot of satisfaction. ~ Alicia Machado

,,,we forget our good actions only slowly, and in fact never truly forget them. ~ Machado De Assis

Hell is the bloodcurdling mansion of time, in whose profoundest circle Satan himself waits, winding a gargantuan watch in his hand. ~ Antonio Machado

People always need hope." "Not always. Too much hope makes for a life full of loose ends. It's not nice to wake up every morning with a life full of loose ends." "So ~ David Machado

There he is, bent over the page, with a monocle in his right eye, wholly devoted to the noble but rugged task of ferreting out the error. He has already promised himself to write a little monograph in which he will relate the finding of the book and the discovery of the error, if there really is one hidden there. In the end, he discovers nothing and contents himself with possession of the book. He closes it, gazes at it, gazes at it again, goes to the window and holds it in the sun. The only copy! At this moment a Caesar or a Cromwell passes beneath his window, on the road to power and glory. He turns his back, closes the window, stretches in his hammock, and fingers the leaves of the book slowly, lovingly, tasting it sip by sip ... An only copy! ~ Machado De Assis

You wanted someone to be obsessed with you. How could you accomplish that? ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant. ~ Antonio Machado

I don't eat Puerto Rican food in L.A. because it's just too much, too addicting, but I know how to cook, so I can easily make it. I just choose not to because you never stop! I think my favorite would be pollo guisado con arroz blanco y habichuelas. I love tostones, I love maduros! I can eat rice and beans all day long! ~ Justina Machado

Nothing could have been more imprudent or more natural than this reply. It reflected the ecstasy inspired by great crises. ~ Machado De Assis

Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline. Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers; Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring; the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate; Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots; The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire; the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes; the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones. Some of them with their own books; the major and minor arcana of our little religion. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I think there's a lot of great beliefs in the Buddhist religion, I think there's a lot of great beliefs in the Christian religion, I think there's a lot of great beliefs in no religion. It just depends on how you feel on the inside. ~ Cristian Machado

I called her two days later, never having believed more firmly in love at first sight, in destiny. When she laughed on the other end of the line, something inside of me cracked open, and I let her step inside. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I am China, pronounced as Chee-na. And I think it's time the world lets older women age gracefully. ~ China Machado

At any given time, there are a lot of million-dollar luxury charter boats cruising around the Mentawai Islands finding the most incredible waves. And yet the people on shore are suffering. The whole scene is wrong. As a surf community, we have to do something. ~ Rob Machado

BUT, in terms of attractiveness, speaking in terms of physical aspects only I think that Argentinean, Italian, Mexican, and Spanish men are among the most attractive men. ~ Alicia Machado

Bacamarte evidenced neither vanity nor modesty; he listened in silence, as impassive as a stone god. ~ Machado De Assis

That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

I make myself lie down every afternoon; otherwise I'll be too exhausted by the night-time. If I can't nap, I'll watch a little bit of TV and just relax for two or three hours. ~ China Machado

And there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse -- nothingness. Not the presence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Dream-travelers, there is no path, paths are made by dreaming. ~ Antonio Machado

He (Antonio Machado) was old, weary and ill, and he no longer believed in Franco's defeat. He wrote 'This is the end; any day now Barcelona will fall. For the strategists, for the politicians, for the historians, it is all clear: we have lost the war. But in human terms, I am not so sure. Perhaps we have won. ~ Javier Cercas

The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
"In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I'd like all the odor of your roses."
"I have no roses; all the flowers
in my garden are dead."
"Well then, I'll take the withered petals
and the yellow leaves and the waters of the fountain."
the wind left. And I wept. And I said to myself:
"What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you? ~ Antonio Machado

When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart. ~ Carmen Maria Machado