Javier Marías Quotes

Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partly responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say.

El que aquí cuenta lo que vio y le ocurrió no es aquel que lo vio y al que le ocurrió.

...possessed of more self-knowledge, which is the kind of knowledge that makes people attractive.

La verdadera unidad de los matrimonios y aun de las parejas la traen las palabras, más que las palabras dichas—dichas voluntariamente—, las palabras que no se callan—que no se callan sin que nuestra voluntad intervenga—.

However dead a past love may be, new lovers are much...upset by them.

Las mentiras son las mentiras, pero todo tiene su tiempo para ser creído.

The person recounting here and now what he saw and what happened to him then is not the same person who saw those things and to whom those things happened.

Todo está ahí a la vista, en realidad todo es visible desde muy pronto en las relaciones como en los relatos honrados, basta con atreverse a mirarlo, un solo instante encierra el germen de muchos años venideros y casi de nuestra historia entera.

Lo más intolerable es que se convierta en pasado quien uno recuerda como futuro.

People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of madness.

Le quedaban por conocer muchas noches en las que sucumbiría a mujeres que su avidez y el alcohol le harían juzgar deseables, para llevarse a la mañana siguiente las manos a la cabeza al descubrir que se había metido en la cama con descomedidas parientes de Oliver Hardy o con casquivanas émulas de Bela Lugosi.

Everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest, straightforward stories, you just have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history.

We always condemn ourselves by what we say, not by what we do.

What is truly unbearable is that the person one recalls as part of the future should suddenly become the past.

This is just a stopping-off point for me but I'll be stopping long enough to make it worth my while finding what people call 'someone to love'.