The Cave Quotes
"The younger man is wearing a uniform, but is unarmed. The older man has on an ordinary jacket and a pair of more or less matching trousers, and his shirt is soberly buttoned up to the neck, with no tie."
"The two men are travelling slowly because of the fragile nature of the load and also because of the uneven road surface."
"The area they are driving through is dull and dirty, not worth a second glance."
"It is true what people say, the young have the ability, but lack the wisdom, and the old have the wisdom, but lack the ability."
"Once past the Industrial Belt, the city finally begins, not the city proper, for that can be seen beyond, touched by the caress of the first, rosy light of the sun."
"Cipriano Algor started up the van. He had got distracted by the buildings under demolition and now wanted to make up for lost time, a ridiculous expression if ever there was one."
"The potter smiled sadly, 'It wasn’t the number thirteen, the number thirteen doesn’t exist, if I had been the first to arrive, the sentence passed would have been just the same, give us half now and then we’ll see, bloody hell.'"
"The organization of the Centre had been conceived and set up according to a model of strict compartmentalization of its various activities and functions."
"He’s black, said Cipriano Algor. When he had taken the dog the food last night, it had seemed to him that the dog was indeed that colour."
"People and things are much the same, they have a certain lifespan, they last for a while, then, like everything else in the world, they come to a sudden end."
"It's as if with the birth of each new person, the mold they emerged from was broken, which is why everyone is different."
"We say to the confused, Know thyself, as if knowing yourself was not the fifth and most difficult of human arithmetical operations."
"The beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading."
"In matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little."
"The brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose."
"All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity."
"Never put your trust in hope, but what else can we do, we have to hold on to something in our hour of need."
"Guards should be treated with respect and consideration, you don’t just say I know."
"Life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day."
"People are free to commit suicide if they choose to, but not by hurling themselves one hundred meters down into the street, such despair would attract too much attention and awaken the morbid curiosity of passers-by, who would immediately want to know why."
"The things a man finds hardest to recognize and confess are his own weaknesses."
"There's something else I'm guilty of too... sometimes I do actually forget that the person to whom I owe that love is a real person, complete in himself."
"We advance, stop and retreat according to [time's] orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out."
"It's just that if you were interested in her, as it seems to me sometimes you are, I thought that perhaps coming to you and telling you that you're about to have a grandchild... might make you realize that your time as a man had reached its end."
"If the pottery goes under, we can always breed dogs."
"Sometimes I think we might be better off not knowing who we are."
"Time isn’t out there waiting for us, we have to start work."
It’s a question of aesthetics," said Marta. "It’s a question of time," said Cipriano Algor, "and confidence.
"The worst pain, my dear, isn’t the pain you feel at the time, it’s the pain you feel later on when there’s nothing you can do about it."
"They say that time heals all wounds, But we never live long enough to test that theory out," said Cipriano Algor.
"Everything is lost in the end, Pa, for years the hollow was just a hollow, as well as a magic door for a few imaginative children, and now, it’ll get filled up with debris and it will be neither one thing nor the other."
"It’s as if we were walking in the dark, with each step we take, we could as easily go forward as fall flat on our face."
"We can’t afford a maid or a domestic or a char or whatever they’re called," said Cipriano Algor sharply.
"So while I was tucked up asleep in my warm sheets, you were out here on guard, it doesn’t matter that your vigilance would not have helped the firing one iota, it’s the gesture that counts."
Work will proceed normally," he said, "I will fulfill our commitments as best I can, without protest or complaint.
"Each person is a silence, yes, that’s it, a silence, each of us with our own silence, each of us with the silence that is us."
"How did they turn out, asked Marta when her father came in, All right, I think, but we need to wash off any ash still clinging to them."
"Some dreams are best escaped from quickly."
"As the saying goes, a worried man can’t sleep, Or else he sleeps, but dreams all night about his problems."
"Anxieties get tangled up together like cherries, one gets caught on another and, in two shakes, the basket’s full."
"Every age has its defects, and that’s the defect that has been afflicting me of late."
"Words were born to play with each other, they don’t know how to do anything else, and contrary to what people may say, there are no such things as empty words."
"At my age, I don’t have that many things to hold on to."
"It’s obvious to anyone that if someone asks a question it’s because he wants to know the answer."
"The webs that weave about human relationships in general and family relationships in particular are more complex than they seem at first sight."
"We talk about parents and children, and think we know perfectly well what we mean, and we do not ask ourselves about the profound reasons for the affection that lies therein or indeed the indifference or the hatred."
"The truth is that Cipriano Algor does not much care anymore."
"The creative bug bit him again and, after a few hours, the fourth figure was ready to go into the kiln."
"It is hard to know now if that preference represents a point in mud’s favour or a point against."
"The secret of the bee doesn’t exist, but we know what it is."
"The assistant head of department’s obscene phrase had done away with what remained of the reality of the world in which he had grown used to living, from now on everything would be little more than appearance, illusion, absence of meaning, questions with no answers."
"You can make neither head nor tail of dreams, not because they don’t have a head and a tail, but because the head and the tail aren’t where you expect them to be, which is why dreams are so hard to interpret."
"Cities are not the best places for dogs."
"Some things will only happen the day after tomorrow, some things will only happen tomorrow, some things will happen today."
"I doubt very much she was sleeping, but I can’t understand why she should have said she was dreaming."
"Today what, he asked himself abruptly, trying to shake off the absurd feeling of apprehension."
"Everything I’m doing is perfectly normal and ordinary and logical, I have no reason to be worried."
"Words we are constantly using, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, as we were passing from this world to the next, we didn’t dredge up the strength to respond to someone who had the imbecilic idea to ask how we were, 'Oh, dying, but otherwise fine,' is what we would say."
"The best way to explain the Centre is to think of it as a city within a city."
"If someone sticks a knife in your guts, they should at least have the moral decency to wear a face in keeping with that murderous act."
"We have always known that the man driving this van has never doubted for a moment that the dreaded news would arrive one day."
"Everything that one desired or feared has already been experienced while one was desiring it or fearing it."
"We would sell you everything you need, but we would prefer you to need what we have to sell."
"We have to do our best to understand and accept it."
"It's a funny expression that, 'After all', That's what people say, Yes, I know, but words which, at first sight, seem to be mere adornment and could, in every sense of the word, easily be discarded, become frightening once you start to think about them and realize what they imply."
"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."
"The proof that it doesn't matter is that you're here now."
"Love isn't a house, it isn't clothes or food."
"The thing I liked best were the natural sensations."
"The first problem to be resolved by the new inhabitants will be to find a satisfactory answer to the question, 'And now what am I going to do?'"
"I’m a species on the verge of extinction, I have no future, I haven’t even got a present."
"Each person must draw his own conclusions, I’ve drawn mine already."