The Autumn Of The Patriarch Quotes
"The air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient."
"In that forbidden corner which only a few people of privilege had ever come to know, we smelled the vultures' carnage for the first time."
"The world went on, life went on, the mail was delivered, the municipal band played its retreat of silly waltzes on Saturday."
"All that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampler during the building's heroic days gave way."
"Only when we turned him over to look at his face did we realize that it was impossible to recognize him."
"Life is the best thing that was ever invented."
"It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner."
"We knew it because the world went on, life went on, the mail was delivered."
"The trouble with this country is that the people have too much time to think on their hands."
"Resolved to dissipate even the dregs of the uneasiness, he decided that those acts of torture would be the last of his regime."
"Not even the least prudent among us would accept appearances because so many times it had been a given fact that there was always another truth behind the truth."
"It would have been easier for a person to let himself be convinced by the immediate indications...but there was always someone who had memories of other similar indications in the case of other less important dead men in the past."
"Although all trace of his origins had disappeared from the texts, it was thought that he was a man of the upland plains because of his immense appetite for power."
"He knew that he was a man without a father like the most illustrious despots of history."
"She lamented, looking at him there with his gold-braided hearse, my poor son didn't have a hole in the ground to fall dead into after all those years of serving his country, lord, it's not fair."
"He was only vulnerable to a coup de grace fired by someone who loved him so much that he would die for him."
"He alone was the nation, he lowered the three crossbars, locked the three locks, threw the three bolts in the bedroom."
"He felt older than God in the shadows of the six in the afternoon dawn in the deserted house, he felt sadder, lonelier than ever in the loneliness of this world without you, my queen."
"Things and people we're not made to last a lifetime."
"Fatherland means staying alive, that's what it is."
"The most feared enemy is within oneself in the confidence of the heart."
"There were orders that can be given but which cannot be carried out."
"Nobody move, nobody breathe, nobody live without my permission."
"It was impossible not to believe all of this since the few newspapers still publishing were still dedicated to proclaiming his eternity and counterfeiting his splendor with material from their files."
"Not only had we ended up really believing that he had been conceived to survive the third comet but that conviction had infused us with a security and a restful feeling that we tried to hide with all manner of jokes about old age."
"The truth was that it wouldn't have mattered to him if he knew it or not or he himself wouldn't have been very sure whether that street joke was true or false."
"He had heard nothing since the sunset mourning rites for Leticia Nazareno when he thought that the birds in his cages were losing their voices from so much singing."
"His only contacts with the reality of this world were by then a few scattered scraps of his largest memories, only they kept him alive after he had been despoiled of the affairs of state."
"His dying mother who had gathered the hens together by making noise with the kernels of corn in a calabash gourd so that he wouldn't notice that she was dying."
"She had trembled in terror before the majesty of the house of power which she first saw through the rain on the night of the attack without having imagined then that it was the house where she would die."
"And yet it seemed impossible to discover her identity because in the records of the monastery where she had been baptized her birth certificate could not be found."
"He had decided beyond appeal that they be embarked naked as the day their mothers bore them."
"He contemplated them impassively, without blinking, until there was not a single one left in all the national territory."
"Thinking ahead about the world that's left after you've gone yourself was something made up of the same ashes as death itself."
"The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole."
"When I finally die the politicians will come back and divide up the mess the way it was during the times of the Goths."
"We were defenseless against that evidence, compromised by a pestilential corpse that we were incapable of replacing in the world."
"To divide up the booty of his power in equal parts, because everyone had come home under the spell of the surreptitious news of his death."
"He was so lucid and stubborn that we could only get evasive answers and postponements out of him every time we brought up the matter of putting his legacy in order."
"He had prohibited the use of public stocks, burial without a coffin, everything that might awaken in one's memory the ignominous laws that existed before his power."
"He had seen that disaster, he had seen a string of headless roosters hanging by their feet and bleeding drop by drop from the eaves of a house."
"He ordered don't send me any more chops, Nacho, your word is enough."
"A hundred years already, God damn it, a hundred years already, the way time passes."
"He had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority."
"A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth."
"One doesn't live, God damn it, one survives."
"The only livable life was one of show, the one we saw from this side which wasn't his general sir, this poor people's side."
"He knew himself to be hated by those who loved him most."
"He suffered the final holocaust of his scant micturition in the portable latrine, he stretched out on the bare floor."
"Who's there, he asked shaken by the certainty that someone had called him in his sleep by a name that was not his, Nicanor."
"He had learned to live with those and all the miseries of glory as he discovered in the course of his uncountable years that a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth."
"He was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting even too late that the only livable life was one of show."
"It was he and no one else who wrote on the walls of the toilets long live the general, long live the stud."