“You don't have to tell the truth. Never. Never. Not to loved ones. They must always be treated with the brightest colors. Take them out favored. Make them believe what they are not. "

Heart that laughs, heart that cries. Maryse Condé 

“Rest assured that nothing and no one will separate us, and while life encourages me, and even later, we will be united by all those on earth who know what it is to love, and cry, and hate, and enjoy, and grieve, and fight and, in short, to feel the happiest, luckiest, bravest, lonely and cowardly among born and unborn men. "

Forgotten King Gudú. Ana Maria Matute

“I learned nothing from you except how to be suspicious. I didn’t know what hate was until I lived among you and saw you hating every day.”

Scout Finch

To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee

“There are all kinds of silences and each one of them means something different. There is the silence that comes with the morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a storm and before a storm, and they are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object such as a recently used chair, or a piano with old dust on its keys, or anything that has responded to a man's need, for pleasure or work. This type of silence can speak.

West with the night. Beryl Markham

“True talent and goodness don't go unnoticed for long; Even if they pass, the knowledge of owning it and using it well, should satisfy us, simplicity is the best charm of all power."

Louisa May Alcott

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

The bell jar. Sylvia Plath

“I don't look for kindness or even good education in people ..., although I think the latter is essential to live with them. I like people who see life with different eyes than others, who consider things differently than most ... Maybe this happens to me because I have always lived with beings who are too normal and satisfied with themselves ... "

Nothing. Carmen Laforet

“The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.”

The waves. Virginia Wolf

"I would say that in life one learns not to rush into thinking that what is good, pleasant, and sensible for oneself is also so for others; this does not mean that one must end up humbly accepting that the methods of others are better, it is enough to assume that they are equally good, and to come to see the beautiful and the good expressed in all possible ways... I would say... that it is a great pleasure to know how to discern the beauty, joy, and harmony of life constantly expressed in diverse forms."

Isak Dinesen.

"-Christmas won't be Christmas without presents," Jo muttered, lying on the carpet. "

“… I would have a stable full of Arabian horses, rooms full of books and write with a magical inkwell, which would make my works as famous as Laurie's music. Before entering my castle, I would like to do something admirable that will not be forgotten after my death. I don't know what it will be, but I hope so and one day I plan to surprise them. I think i will write books to make me famous and rich; that agrees with me, so it's my favorite dream. "

Jo March, Little Women. Harper Lee

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.” 

The year of magical thinking. Joan Didion

“Since the world is world, living and dying have been the heads and tails of the same coin thrown into the air, but if it comes up heads it is even more absurd. For me, if you want me to tell you the truth, the strange thing is to live. "

The strange thing is to live. Carmen Martin Gaite

“The past is fragile, as fragile as bones grown brittle with age, as fragile as ghosts seen in windows or the dreams that fall apart upon waking and leave nothing behind them but a feeling of unease or distress or, more rarely, a kind of eerie satisfaction.” 

Memories of the future. Siri Hustvedt

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

Pride and prejudice. Jane Austen

“Paris had its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains of dust that crack under your teeth like pepper. In the darknes the danger seemed to grow. You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Everyone looked at their house and thought, "Tomorrow it will be in ruins, tomorrow I'l have nothing left.”

Suite française. Irène Némirovsky

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing 1 but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." 

To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee

“I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”

Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brönte

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” 

Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.” 

The Song of the Lark. Willa Cather

"Creative jobs cause pain here or there, and you have to know how to alleviate them without completely closing that wound from which images, stories or music are born."

Places that I don't want to share with anyone. Elvira Lindo

"Because, no matter what anyone says, books provide answers. Even if they are not solutions, even if they are not definitive. Instantaneous answers, lights that flash in the darkness. A beautiful phrase, a passage from a novel, a verse: there, suddenly, is the truth. And all the meaninglessness, and all the disorder, suddenly turn into beauty."

Soledad Puértolas

"Human beings are gregarious by birth, but a cruel tradition forces them to accept attitudes that do not agree with their deepest nature, however, there are men who are heroes by nature: they will give everything of themselves regardless of effort or personal benefit”.

The heart is a lonely hunter. Carson McCullers

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.” 

Wuthering Heights. Emily Jane Brontë 

“Leaving any bookstore is hard, especially on a day in August, when the street outside burns and glares, and the books inside are cool and crisp to the touch; especially on a day in January, when the wind is blowing, the ice is treacherous, and the books inside seem to gather together in colorful warmth. It's hard to leave a bookstore any day of the year, though, because a bookstore is one of the few places where all the cantankerous, conflicting, alluring voices of the world co-exist in peace and order and the avid reader is as free as a person can possibly be, because she is free to choose among them.”

Jane Smiley

“As regards the education of children, I think that you should not teach them the little virtues, but the great ones. Not savings, but generosity and indifference to money; not prudence, but courage and contempt for danger; not cunning, but frankness and love of truth; not diplomacy, but love of neighbor and admiration; not the desire for success, but the desire to be and to know. "

The Little Virtues. Natalia Ginzburg 

“When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.” 

Poems New and Collected. Wisława Szymborska

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become."

Ursula K. Le Guin

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” 

Toni Morrison

“I began to realize what everyone in the world knows and routinely forgets: that to be loved sexually is to be loved not for one's actual self but for one's ability to arouse desire in the other...Only the thoughts in one's mind or intuitions of the spirit can attract permanently...” 

The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir. Vivian Gornick

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!” 

Frankenstein. Mary Shelley

“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things . . . the trivial pleasure like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.” 

Barbara Pym

“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.” 

Alice Munro

“Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup” 

Selected Writings. Gertrude Stein

"We lived, as usual, by ignoring. You can't ignore what you know. Ignoring is not the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

The Handmaid's Tale. Margaret Atwood

"I suspect that the most we can hope for, and it is no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love."

Abide with me. Elizabeth Strout

“Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.” 

Gloria Steinem

“It is not because we are rats that we tend to abandon people who are down, it is because we are embarrassed.” 

A Far Cry from Kensington. Muriel Spark

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.” 

The Hour of the Star. Clarice Lispector

“What would it be like, to live in a library, of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor, and all the punctuation, settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.” 

Anne Carson

"Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not“

In the Forest. Edna O’Brien

“At dawn was the word, and every chronicle, every story has its dawn, its origin. The story can be taken from the end, the middle or the beginning, but the autobiographical genre deprives genealogy and the telling of life from birth. "

Rosa Chacel

“Love is bribe and blackmail”

Laura Freixas

“Affection is like the light of noon and does not need the presence of the other to manifest itself. The separation between beings is also illusory, since everything is united in the universe.”

Isabel Allende

“You are circulating through my veins. I feel you slide slowly. I rest my fingers on the arteries of the temples, neck, cuffs, to feel you. "

Alfonsina Storni

“Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.” 

Walks with Men. Ann Beattie

“Sun, silence, and happiness.” 

The Pursuit of Love. Nancy Mitford

“I had only one desire: to leave, to walk, to die, whatever. I wanted to get away, never come back, disappear, melt away into the forest, the clouds, no longer have memories, forget, forget.” 

Yesterday. Ágota Kristóf

“Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.” 

The Liars' Club. Mary Karr 

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” 

Selected Letters. Emily Dickinson

"Would you allow Shakespeare and Company to have the honor of publishing Ulysses? "

Sylvia Beach to James Joyce, Paris 1920

“Shakespeare and Company was a warm and cheerful place, with a big stove in winter, tables and bookcases, new books in the windows, and on the walls photos of writers both dead and alive. The photos all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers seemed to actually be alive. Sylvia had a lively face with angular modeling, brown eyes as lively as a beast's and as cheerful as a girl's, and wavy brown hair that was combed back from her beautiful forehead and cut flush with her ears and following the same curve of the neck of the velvet jackets he wore. She had nice legs and was kind and cheerful and was interested in conversation, and she liked to joke and tell jokes. No one has ever offered me more kindness than her. The first time I entered the bookstore I was very intimidated and didn't have enough money to subscribe to the circulating library. She told me that I would give her the deposit any day that was comfortable for me and she gave me a subscriber card and said that I could take the books I wanted. "

Paris was a party. Ernest Hemingway

“Because the essential characteristic of what we call madness is loneliness, but a monumental loneliness. A loneliness so great that it does not fit within the word loneliness and that one cannot even imagine if it has not been there. It is feeling that you have disconnected from the world, that they will not be able to understand you, that you have no words to express yourself. It is like speaking a language that no one else knows. It is to be an astronaut floating adrift in the black and empty vastness of outer space. I'm talking about that size of loneliness. And it turns out that in real pain, in avalanche pain, something similar happens. Although the feeling of disconnection is not so extreme, you cannot share or explain your suffering. Conventional wisdom already says: Fulanito went crazy with pain. Acute grief is an alienation. You shut up and shut yourself up. "

The ridiculous idea of not to see you again. Rosa Montero