Jose Eduardo Agualusa Quotes & Sayings

I lived for almost a century in the skin of a man, and I never managed to feel altogether human either. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

God weighs souls on a pair of scales. In one of the dishes is the soul, and in the other, the tears of those who weep for it. If nobody cries, the soul goes straight down to hell. If there are enough tears and they are sufficiently heartfelt, it rises up to heaven. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

The night, like a well, was swallowing stars. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Sometimes they don't write what I mean, they just write what I say. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Lies are everywhere. Even nature herself lies. What is camouflage, for instance, but a lie? The chameleon disguises itself as a leaf in order to deceive a poor butterfly. He lies to it saying, Don't worry, my dear, can't you see I'm just a very green leaf waving in the breeze, and then he jets out his tongue at six hundred and twenty-five centimeters a second, and eats it. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Dreams Are Where It All Begins — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Foreigner ate with a glowing appetite, as though he weren't tasting the firm flesh of the snapper but its whole life, the years and years slipping between the sudden explosions of a shoal, the whirling of the waters, the thick strands of light that on sunny evenings fall straight down into the blue abyss. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Nothing seems true that cannot also seem false. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. ( ... ) These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they're so far away we can't touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can't be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them? — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

He reminds me of a guy I met many years ago. He died. A shame, as I'd have really liked to kill him again. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

If you were this fish, would you prefer me to be eating you with sadness or with delight? — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Truth is superstition. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Trees, little animals, a multitude of insects were sharing their dreams with me. There we all were, dreaming in chorus, like a crowd, in a tiny room, exchanging ideas and smells and caresses. I remember I was a spider advancing toward its prey and the fly caught in the web of that spider. I felt flowers blossoming in the sun, breezes carrying pollen. I awoke and was alone. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

A man with a good story is practically a king. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Reality is painful and imperfect ... That's just the way it is, that's how we distinguish it from dreams. When something seems absolutely lovely we think it can only be a dream, and we pinch ourselves just to be sure we're really not dreaming - if it hurts it's because we're not dreaming. Reality can hurt us, even those moments when it may seem to us to be a dream. You can find everything that exists in the world in books - sometimes truer in colors, and without the real pain of everything that really does exist. Given a choice between life and books, my son, you must choose books — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Misery does ever so well in wealthy countries. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

He was evil, and he didn't know it. He didn't know what evil was. That is to say, he was pure evil. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

If, when we are asleep, we can dream of sleeping, can we then, when awake, awaken within a more lucid reality? — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

He takes a deep breath, and opens the door. In my other life I used to know people like that
they're frightened by the sound of wind through the leaves, they can't bear cockroaches, not to mention policemen, lawyers, even dentists. And yet when the dragon bursts into the clearing, opens its mouth and spits fire, they stand up to them. Calm, cool as an angel. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I have understood over these last years that in order to believe in God, it is essential to have trust in humanity. There is no God without humanity.

I continue not to believe, neither in God, nor in humanity. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

What life expects of us is that we celebrate. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Happiness is almost always irresponsible. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I know now-I think I probably already knew then- that all lives are exceptional. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

When people look at clouds they do not see their real shape, which is no shape at all, or every shape, because they are constantly changing. They see whatever it is that their heart yearns for. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I was happy with her and I suspect I never knew her.Would I have been truly happy if I had actually known her? — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I've met a remarkable woman. Oh, my friend, I don't have the words to describe her
everything about her is Light.
I thought he was exaggerating. Where there is light, there are shadows too. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Sincerity is almost love. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

If he'd been able to he would have rolled out a rose-petal carpet at her feet. He would have liked to conduct an orchestra of birds to sing as rainbows appeared in the sky, one by one. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

One of those characters who in Angola are often called 'lost frontiers', because by daylight they look white, and at twilight they are discovered in fact to be half mulatto - from which it might be concluded that sometimes you can understand people better further away form the light. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Hope, he joked. Always the last to die. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Some people are destined to dream (some, indeed, are paid rather well to do so); some are born to work, practical and concrete and tireless; and there are others who are like a river, who flow effortlessly down from source to mouth, hardly straying from its bed. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

However, he began to walk stooped slightly to the left, as though he were being pushed, from within, by a violent gale. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Imagine a young man racing along on his motorcycle, on a minor road. The wind is beating at his face. The young man closes his eyes, and opens his arms wide, just like they do in films, feeling himself completely alive and in communion with the universe. He doesn't see the lorry lunging out from the crossing. He dies happy. Happiness is almost always irresponsible. We're happy for those brief moments when we close our eyes. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

If I still had the space, charcoal, and available walls,
I could compose a great work about forgetting:
a general theory of oblivion. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

We're only happy--truly happy--when it's forever after, but only children live in a world where things can last forever. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

The days slide by as if they were liquid. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Monsters, show me the monsters: these people out on the street.

My people. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Nothing happened today. I slept.
While asleep I dreamed that I was sleeping. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I'm at peace, at last. I fear nothing. I yearn for nothing. I suppose you could call that happiness — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

A guava tree in bloom, for instance, lost in the pages of a good novel, can bring delight with its fictional perfume to any number of real rooms. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Courage isn't contagious; fear is, of course. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

I save on food, on water, on fire and on adjetives. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

All stories are connected. In the end everything is connected. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

There are people who from early on reveal a great talent for misfortune. Unhappiness pummels at them like a stoning, every other day, and they accept it with a resigned sigh. Others, meanwhile, have a peculiar propensity for the happiness. Faced with an abyss the latter are attracted by its blueness, the former by its intoxication. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

Her returned in the evening, drier, sharper, a man with a closer kinship with a thorn bush. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa

In your novels do you lie deliberately or just out of ignorance?"
Laughter. A murmur of approval. The writer hesitated a few seconds. Then counter-attacked:
"I'm a liar by vocation," he shouted. "I lie with joy! Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance."
Then more soberly, he added - his voice lowered - that the principal difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in the former there exists only one truth, the truth as imposed by power, while in free countries every man has the right to defend his own version of events.
Truth, he said, is a superstition. — Jose Eduardo Agualusa