Cela Quotes & Sayings

But I'd better not go to fast in my story, for all things want their order, and no matter how early one gets up, dawn doesn't come any sooner. — Camilo Jose Cela Conde

Perhaps there is to be found in Pastrana the key to something which happens in Spain more frequently than is necessary. Past splendor overwhelms and in the end exhausts the people's will; and without force of will, as can be seen in so many cases, by being exclusively occupied with the contemplation of the glories of the past, they leave current problems unsolved. When the belly is empty and the mind filled with golden memories, the golden memories continually retreat and at last, though no one goes so far as to admit it, there is even doubt whether they ever existed and there is nothing left of them but a benevolent and useless cultural residue. — Camilo Jose Cela

What happened to you? When did you stop believing in yourself? In your gift? In what you deserve? — Jennifer Probst

On the hinder slope of the hill two little goatherds are tending a flock of goats; one of them is sitting on a rock whittling a crook out of ash, while the other is trying to coax a few tweets out of a reed flute. — Camilo Jose Cela

I am not, sir, a bad person, though in truth I am not lacking in reasons for being one.
[Sp., Yo, senor, no soy malo, aunque no me faltarian motivos para serlo.] — Camilo Jose Cela

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user. — Reid Hoffman

I'm not made to philosophize, I don't have the heart for it. My heart is more like a machine for making blood to be spilled in a knife fight... — Camilo Jose Cela

There are two kinds of man: the ones who make history and the ones who endure it. — Camilo Jose Cela

Ideas? My head is full of them, one after the other, but they serve no purpose there. They must be put down on paper, one after the other. — Camilo Jose Cela

But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged. — Jean-Paul Sartre

When debts are not paid because they cannot be paid, the best thing to do is not talk about them, and shuffle the cards again. — Camilo Jose Cela

Virginia was not quite fourteen when Harry Edgar possessed her. He gave her lessons in algebra. Je m'imagine cela. They spent their honeymoon at Petersburg, Fla. "Monsieur Poe-poe," as that boy in one of Monsieur Humbert Humbert's classes in Paris called the poet-poet. — Vladimir Nabokov

Just hold on. Just for a minute."
"Are you all right ?"
I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.
"I'm fine. I just ... I don't want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about ... I just ... want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more ... — Jojo Moyes

Chacun exige d'e" tre innocent, a' tout prix, me" me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven. — Albert Camus

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives. — Camilo Jose Cela

Men spend their life down here in the worship of petty (or mean) interests and the search of perishable things, and with that ("et avec cela", Fr.) they pretend to perpetuate for all eternity their self ("moi", Fr.) so hardly worthy ("digne", Fr.) of it. — African Spir

In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists. — Booker T. Washington