Angelina Muñiz-Huberman Quotes

If the 20th century was the century of disillusionment, as I have called it, the 21st is that of absolute stupidity. Of delirious futility. Of frenetic destruction. Of dumbing-down the mind. Of utter sloth and, therefore, incompetence. Of lying sprawled out on the couch. Of feet up on the table. Of troglodytism. Of amnesia. But not magnesia. Of the electronic internet revolution. Everything within easy reach of the keyboard and the docile finger. An homage without further ado to the obliging finger. It will have to change its look, wipe off its unique fingerprint in exchange for a collective one. (beginning of "A Stroll Through the 20th Century")

Sometimes you have to exaggerate to rectify, to adjust and upgrade the vision ("This is Not a Prologue")

It happens that one day the children begin to draw, and everything that was missing in that narrow, enclosed world begins appearing on scraps of paper gathered from any corner. Red suns, houses with doors and windows with cheery curtains, smoking chimneys and roads bordered with flowers which lead to the house and tall trees in the background. Boys and girls who jump and play; even dogs and cats and birds and butterflies, especially butterflies. Great blue flowers stuck on the walls. Sunlight overflowing everywhere. But this is not tolerated. It is not possible to create light in a dark world. A smile is not permitted. The dragon brings total blackness.

Most men worry about leaving their fleeting shadow on the slippery surface of history, but I knew that my life had already been lived and that I only repeated an ancient and unjust tale.

Thus it is that the man who invokes the dragon becomes his slave and has to feed the swollen belly and its insatiable appetite. Because the dragon promises him everything but demands everything of him.

Every day that I said nothing the silence became more and more necessary. The silence was as still as stagnant water. The silence stung like sudden hailstones. The silence sowed doubt and created words which were never spoken.

what can be affirmed is too limited, too small. The not is much more imaginative; prohibition inspires inquiry. ("This is Not a Prologue")

silence is the most priceless music of all. (p101)

And so, through reading, distance in time and space becomes one. Memory is the necessary guide, the one that settles conflicts, the one that fills in the gaps. The great warehouse of forgotten things that are one day recovered. Amid the dust and spiderwebs, the mists establish their kingdom without the least haste. Just wait a while, and they clear away. (p112)

The guts and the skin. The innocent and the prudish. Writing from the gut: about the unseen, the unknown, the absolute mystery. Not about the skin, the superficial, the visible. Do away with hot topics. Never what's expected, the facile, what sells. The prostituted.
Yes, to the individual, the unique, the shockingly rare. That terrifying thing: the other, not what is the same. (beginning of "The Guts and the Skin")

They were but one page, one paragraph, one line, one word, one sound in history's great book of mix-ups. (p94)

You had grown and were strong and handsome; I was always in your shadow, with no light of my own and no one to discover me.

Who holds sway, the gods or man? I couldn't pray to the gods because I was going to be impure, but man, the man who slowly climbed the stairs, filled me to overflowing