In Memoriam

"Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal. Monstrous the first vertebrate that succeeded in standing on two feet and thus spread terror among the beasts still normally and happily crawling close to the ground through the slime of creation. Astounding the first telephone call, the first boiling water, the first song, the first loincloth."
  ― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra

“Love can isolate us from everything around us. But in its absence, we can be filled with the fear that something comparable exists.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas Las Familias Felices

“The contract between the author and the reader is a game. And the game . . . is one of the greatest invetions of Western civilization: the game of telling stories, inventing characters, and creating the imaginary paradise of the individual, from whence no one can be expelled because, in a novel, no one owns the truth and everyone has the right to be heard and understood.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

“Language is always the companion of Empire and Empire . . . is one Monarch and one Sword.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn

“There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Myself with Others: Selected Essays

 
“When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”
 —Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68

“Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Todas Las Familias Felices