Letras Menudas

Cuantas más cosas sabes de la Guerra Civil, más duro es entenderla, poseerla, explicarla. Quizá por eso es tan difícil hacer películas sobre la Guerra Civil

(pág. 21)

Es aterrador sospechar las dimensiones de la ignorancia de uno.

(pág. 36)

Todo el mundo se muestra muy entusiasmado con el guión, pero he aprendido a desconfiar de esta clase de cosas. He aprendido a discernir entre el «it’s so wonderful» y el «I really feel passionate about this». Entre la emoción postiza de Los Ángeles y la emoción verdadera. No es fácil, pero cuando me llevo un momentito llevar por la euforia de los halagos, siempre está Monika a mi lado para recordarme que, en esta ciudad,  hacer la pelota es tan común como tener acidez de estómago al salir de Starbucks.

(pág. 101)

Isabel Coixet, Grup 62 Ediciones El Aleph, 2004

There’s a natural alliance between actors and whores

(pág. 17)

…They want to be entertained, not clubbed by some ancient relic. They want to know about real people, not savages.

- But that’s not human culture.

- So what?

(pág. 36)

Politics pulls things together, technology blows them apart.

(pág. 118)

Mankind no longer exists

(pág. 150)

…-those aren’t philosophies, they’re techologies made into politics. The technologies are at the core of it.

(pág. 151)

I’m not concerned with ideology. What concerns me is the future.

(pág. 155)

The future belongs to Posthumanism, Linday. Not to nation-states, not to factions. It belongs to life, and life moves in cadles.

(pág. 171)

Too much dignity cripples a man. Fanatics never laugh.

(pág. 192)

Nations don’t last in this era. Only people last, only plans and hopes…. I can only offer you what I have. I don’t have safety. I have freedom.

(pág. 213)

Bruce Sterling, Ace Books 1996

Cambiemos el mundo. Cambiar el mundo es algo muy serio como para dejárselo a los jóvenes. Ellos ya tienen bastante con pensar en sexo y drogas…

(pág. 73)

How twisted the humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.

Puede que eso sea la escritura: viajar por el mundo, por los asuntos de los hombres, y dar cuenta de ellos. Quedan en mal lugar entonces todos los grandes pórticos de lo que llamábamos, pomposamente, literatura. “Muchos años después, al frente del pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía habría de recordar…”, etc. Escribir, nos enseñaron, iba a ser eso.  Y parece que no.

LA is the loneliest and most brutal of american cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there is a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.

…but the artist is an eternal type, solid, purposeful, observant – and beneath it all, p-p-assionate, eh, Charles?

Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked.

I do not intend to save for the sake of an heir. I made my economies in my youth and they were fairly painless because the young do not particulary care for luxury. They have other interests than spending and can make love on a Coca-Cola, a drink which is nauseating in age.

(pág. 66)

I nearly became a Roman Catholic once. Because of the Kennedys. But then when two of them got shot – I mean I’m superstitious. Was Macbeth a Catholic?

(pág. 93)

My books are a good antidote to foreign travel and reinforce the sense of the England I love, but sometimes I wonder whether that England exists still beyond my garden hedge or further than Church Road.

(pág. 157)

One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books.

(pág. 194)

“There speaks a Protestant, Mr. Visconti said,. “Any Catholic knows that a legend which is believed has the same value and effect as the truth. Look at the cult of the saints”

(pág. 250)

It’s not a question of right or wrong. That’s the way the world works. Everyman is the prisoner of his pecker, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it. We try to fight it sometimes, but it’s always a losing battle.

(pág. 94)