Alejo Carpentier Quotes & Sayings

I gladly accepted the commission but was uncertain about what the end result would be. On the one hand, Cuban music was conquering the world; being heard everywhere, and our small island was already producing one of the popular musical genres of the 20th century. — Alejo Carpentier

In America everything is fantastical. — Alejo Carpentier

Geese were orderly beings, with principles and systems, whose existence denied all superiority of individual over individual of the same species (176). — Alejo Carpentier

The anxious wait lasted four years, and the alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs (36-37). — Alejo Carpentier

I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner. — Alejo Carpentier

The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt (171-172). — Alejo Carpentier

How hard it is to become a man again when one has ceased to be a man. -The Lost Steps — Alejo Carpentier

Now he understood that a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man's greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of this World. — Alejo Carpentier

The thunder traveled over the ship, from west to east, with prolonged reverberations, before it moved away with its clouds, leaving the sea, by mid-afternoon, bathed in a strange auroral light, which turned its as smooth and iridescent as a mountain lake. The bow of the Arrow became a plough, breaking up the tranquility of the surface with the frothy arabesques of its wake. Pg 301 Explosion in the Cathedral — Alejo Carpentier

Those who have always had faith in its final success can do no less than rejoice as if it was our own triumph after five years of daily struggle to impose Cuban music on the European continent. — Alejo Carpentier

The truth was much more beautiful. — Alejo Carpentier

A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem. — Alejo Carpentier

For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World (179). — Alejo Carpentier

I asked myself whether, in bygone days, men had longed for bygone days as I, this summer morning, longed for certain ways of life that man had lost forever. — Alejo Carpentier