The House Of The Spirits Quotes
"Barrabás arrived on a Holy Thursday. He was in a despicable cage, caked with his own excrement and urine, and had the lost look of a hapless, utterly defenseless prisoner."
"Terrifying dark bundles loomed where the life-size saints had stood, each with its influenza-pale expression, its elaborate wig woven from the hair of someone long dead."
"It was a long week of penitence and fasting, during which there were no card games and no music that might lead to lust or abandon."
"She had a deep distrust of cassocks and was bored by descriptions of heaven, purgatory, and hell."
"Her mother explained it to me this way: she said that no one felt strong enough to spend his life protecting her from other men’s desire."
"I wasn’t the type who’s always falling in love—I never have been. I’m the faithful type, though it’s true that all it takes is the shadow of an arm, the curve of a waist, or the crease of a female knee to put ideas into my head even now."
"Her beauty struck fear into their hearts and they preferred to admire her from afar, not daring to approach her."
"He swept down the aisle and as she passed me her astonishing gold eyes rested for a moment on my own. Part of me must have died."
"She rarely thought about her fiancé, Esteban Trueba, not because she did not love him but because of her forgetful nature and because two years’ absence is a long time."
"She continued to peer at the horizon. After a week with no word from the flying uncle, people began to speculate that he had gone so high that he had disappeared into outer space."
"Land is something one should never sell. It’s the only thing that’s left when everything else is gone."
"My life is changing," he said softly. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
"No one’s going to convince me that I wasn’t a good patrón."
"I would like to have been born a man, so I could leave too," she said, full of hatred.
"They finished eating in silence. The brother and sister had drifted apart, and the only thing that remained to unite them was the presence of their mother and the vague memory of the love they had had for each other as children."
"I don’t plan to be poor ever again!" he decided, dreaming of the seam of gold.
"I think I’m going to go to the country, maybe to Tres Marías."
"You’ll never lack for anything so long as I live," he said.
It’s because of the smell," Férula said brusquely. "It clings.
"I’m the first one up and the last one to bed in this godforsaken place."
"I hope so," he replied. "It's not one, it's two," Clara replied. "The twins will be called Jaime and Nicolás, respectively," she added.
"I think I'm going to elevate," she said.
"Do you want to marry me?" Clara asked, and he noticed an ironic gleam in her hazel eyes.
"Don’t worry," she said. "You’re going to live with us and the two of us will be just like sisters."
"I want to know, Mama. I don’t want to waste my time," Clara said.
"She’s a bit on the stupid side, Férula concluded with delight."
Poor things," she would say. "They need their father and their mother.
"I want to live like a human being, the way I always have," Férula exclaimed.
"I think I’m giving birth!" Clara told the driver.
"You can't keep the world from changing, Esteban."
"That's the way it's always been, son. You can't change the law of God."
"I like this, patrón. In union there is strength, as Father José Dulce María says."
"The peasants are always the last to understand. We don’t know what’s going on in other parts of the world."
"It’s time you learned to stay with your own class instead of nosing around señoritas."
"You can’t find someone who doesn’t want to be found."
"I won’t have these Bolshevik ideas brought into my house."
"It's not me who's changed, it's the world."
"My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left."
"The only thing that never crossed his mind was that his son’s visits might have something to do with Blanca Trueba’s outings by the river."
"I admit that by the end even Clara couldn’t stop my tantrums."
"The desire I had for her when we married had not diminished; I wanted to possess her absolutely, down to her last thought."
"I would think of my mother sitting in her wheelchair and rotting alive, and that gave me the tenacity to stand up and start walking, even if it was with the aid of curses."
"I don’t have long to go before I’ll be in the ground. I’ve never killed anyone, and the closest I came to doing so was the day I picked up an axe and threw myself on Pedro Tercero García."
"But Clara had no patience with misfortune."
"She stopped using her married name and removed the fine gold wedding ring that he had placed on her finger twenty years before."
"Clara reigned over them like a small, happy, toothless queen."
"Clara noticed that her son often had bad moments, but even her prodigious intuition did not allow her to make the connection between the Oriental pipes Nicolás smoked, his strange deliriums, his periodic drowsiness, and his attacks of sudden happiness, because she had never heard of that or any other drug."
"There were only two pairs of pants and three shirts in his closet."
"All the money his father gave him ended up in the pockets of the impoverished people he cared for in the hospital."
"He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned."
"You’re fantastic, Clara! If you say so, I’ll be senator."
"I was about to throw myself into the river with a heavy stone tied to my feet, but then I decided to become a priest."
"You’ll see Blanca again, the day you least expect to."
"He tried to tell himself that his son’s eccentricities would disappear with age."
"She was so green and slight that it was hard for him to recognize her."
"Can’t you see my soul is very old and you’re still a child?"
"He was like a shadow in the house, giving his mother a distracted kiss whenever he saw her."
"Her friends grew afraid of her, for every time she showed up on a visit it was because she needed something."
"Someday this house will make a good hotel."
"He respected the law, the nation, and tradition, and no one could accuse him of any greater offense than tax evasion."
"He spent several months devoting himself to his campaign, drawing on the support of the Conservative Party."
"The big house on the corner soon came to resemble a labyrinth."
"In the center of the room was his bed, actually an army cot, which was lit by a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling directly above his pillow."
"He had been a reticent child, and later became a timid man."
"He did not love himself and perhaps for that reason felt that he did not deserve the love of others."
"This was how my granddaughter learned that the contents of the pigskin hatbox she used for celebrating black masses and decorating her playhouse in the basement was the head of her Great-Grandmother Nívea."
"Marxism doesn’t stand a chance in Latin America. Don’t you know it doesn’t allow for the magical side of things? It’s an atheistic, practical, functional doctrine."
"I’m not going anywhere, Your Excellency! The minute I look away, the Marxists will pull that chair right out from under you!"
"In her place was a skull with empty sockets, a few strips of marble-colored skin clinging to its cheekbones, and a lock or two of moldy hair at its nape."
"Senator Trueba roared in his earthquake of a voice."
"She was the motor that drove the magic universe that was the rear section of the big house on the corner, where Alba spent her first seven years in complete freedom."
"Alba’s childhood was a mixture of vegetarian diets, Japanese martial arts, Tibetan dance, yogic breathing, relaxation and concentration with Professor Hausser, and many other interesting techniques."
"The only frivolous attention they lavished on her was to comb her hair with bay rum to mitigate the dark-green hue it had when she was born."
"Land is all you have left when everything else falls apart."
"He was an anarchist. From the chickens and the foxes he had gone on to sing of life, friendship, love, and also revolution."
"If she’s not my daughter, she deserves to be."
"The strength of this immutable desire saved her from the mediocrity and sadness of her fate."
"I see my father didn’t have a single friend," Alba observed.
"We always think things like that only happen elsewhere," said Miguel, "until they happen to us too."
"You have no business being there with all those Communists!" Esteban Trueba roared.
"I’m going to introduce you to Aphrodite."
"I wonder who Clara is," I heard her murmur as she left.
"You’d think we were going to be in here for months!" Alba exclaimed, delighted at the prospect of being under siege.
"It’s boring to walk around in these rags and grapes, patrón, but the men like it."
"I don’t think they’d dare break in here," Sebastián Gómez said.
"We’re not interested in a military coup, General," the head of Embassy intelligence replied.
"In my house I do as I see fit and store as many boxes as I feel like!" Senator Trueba thundered.
"If you weren’t my uncle, I’d marry you," Alba joked.
"In a lifetime of living with misery and pain, his soul had not hardened; if anything it was increasingly vulnerable to pity."
"I’ll always be with you. I have faith in our nation and its destiny. Other men will prevail, and soon the great avenues will be open again, where free men will walk, to build a better society. Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words. I know my sacrifice will not have been in vain."
"He who lives by the sword must die by the sword. Maybe I’ll kill him myself one of these days."
"I’ve come to get you out of here," Trueba said. "Why?" Pedro Tercero asked. "Because Blanca asked me to," the other answered.
"He’ll die in bed. He’s very old now," Alba said.
"Don’t ask me questions you don’t want to know the answer to," Alba replied, looking him in the
"None of the children paid attention when she stopped along the way to pick up a blond man."
"I’m scared, Miguel," Alba said. "Aren’t we ever going to be able to lead a normal life? Why don’t we go abroad? Why don’t we escape now, while we still can?"
"Then let me go with you!" she begged, as she had so many times before.
"If the police ever get hold of you, it’s better if you don’t know anything," Miguel replied.
"All this, he continued to maintain, was a monstrous Communist lie; but in the remote event that it was true, it would still not be Alba’s responsibility to shoulder the burden, but the government’s or, as a last resort, the Church’s."
"Where the devil is the portrait of your grandmother?" he lowered.