I was born in 1920, during the influenza pandemic, and I’m going to die in 2020, during the outbreak of coronavirus. What an elegant name for such a terrible scourge.
There’s a time to live and a time to die. In between there’s time to remember.
No nation had wanted to report the true number of deaths. Only Spain, who had remained neutral in the conflict, shared news of the illness, which is why it ended up being called the Spanish influenza.
I am careful, Felipe, but not with my friends.
Since it was already understood that the illness entered the body through the breath and not from a mosquito bite or stomach worms, as had been widely believed, the use of face coverings was ordered. But since there weren’t even sufficient masks for health workers, who fought on the front lines, there certainly weren’t enough to go around for the general population.
Women’s creativity is called craft and is sold cheap; when men create, the result is called art and is costly, like Maurizio Cattelan’s banana taped to a Miami art gallery wall with a price tag of US$120,000.
More than forty years ago Bella Abzug, the famous activist and congresswoman from New York, summarized the above in one sentence: “In the twenty-first century women will change the nature of power instead of power changing the nature of women.” My.
The road of gluttony leads straight to lust and, if traveled a little farther, to the loss of one’s soul.
Trueba continued polishing his reputation as a rake, sowing the entire region with his bastard offspring, reaping hatred, and storing up sins that barely nicked him because he had hardened his soul and silenced his conscience with the excuse of progress.
Many of us daughters have had to live the lives that our mothers could not.
El amor siempre se me ha dado a medias.
I don’t look bad despite my age, do I? The few friends I have left look like iguanas.
Girls are denied the right to be angry and to thrash about.
He sensed he learned a lesson, although the precise meaning of that lesson wasn’t clear to him.
I like fabrics, colors, makeup, and the routine of putting myself together every morning, even though I spend most of my time locked away in the attic writing. “No one sees me, but I see myself,” my mother would comment philosophically.
Patriarchy is imposed with aggression; it demands obedience and punishes those who defy it.
During the years he spent in Venezuela he thought he had once and for all overcome the solemnity that had been an essential part of his nature from childhood, as though he was in mourning for all the world’s suffering, violence and evil. Faced with so many disasters, happiness seemed to him obscene. In love with Roser in the green, warm country of Venezuela, he had vanquished the temptation to cloak himself in sadness.
Truth is short-lived, watered down by torrents of rain.
We can speak up because we don’t care to compete, to please, or to be popular.
Nascemos com certas cartas, e com elas jogamos nosso jogo; alguns recebem cartas ruins e perdem tudo, mas outros jogam magistralmente com essas mesmas cartas e triunfam.