Myself with Others: Selected Essays
Carlos Fuentes
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.”
“Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.”
“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.”
“Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.”
“The great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.”
“The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.”
“All truth is double, and perhaps multiple; absolute reason is as dangerous as absolute faith; reason also has its madness”
“Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism. Don Quixote is the polar opposite of Robinson. . . . Robinson and Quixote are the antithetical symbols of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds.”
“Language is a shared and sharing part of a culture that cares little about formal classifications and much about vitality and connection, for culture itself perishes in purity or isolation, which is the deadly wages of perfection. Like bread and love, language is shared with others. And human beings share a tradition. There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.”
“How to accept the diversity and mutilation of the world, while retaining the minds power for analogy and unity, so this changing world shall not become meaningless?”
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Book Keywords:
racism, reality, story, words, understanding, creation, content, freedom, form, novel, narrative, diversity, society, allusion, tradition, writing, simplification, capitalism, imperialism, images, culture, truth, language, faith, imagination, myth, reason
