Alejo Carpentier Quotes

#1. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World (179).

Alejo Carpentier

#2. The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt (171-172).

Alejo Carpentier

#3. A day will come when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem.

Alejo Carpentier

#4. I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.

Alejo Carpentier

#5. Those who have always had faith in its final success can do no less than rejoice as if it was our own triumph after five years of daily struggle to impose Cuban music on the European continent.

Alejo Carpentier

#6. Geese were orderly beings, with principles and systems, whose existence denied all superiority of individual over individual of the same species (176).

Alejo Carpentier

#7. In America everything is fantastical.

Alejo Carpentier

#8. I asked myself whether, in bygone days, men had longed for bygone days as I, this summer morning, longed for certain ways of life that man had lost forever.

Alejo Carpentier

#9. The truth was much more beautiful.

Alejo Carpentier

#10. How hard it is to become a man again when one has ceased to be a man. -The Lost Steps

Alejo Carpentier

#11. I gladly accepted the commission but was uncertain about what the end result would be. On the one hand, Cuban music was conquering the world; being heard everywhere, and our small island was already producing one of the popular musical genres of the 20th century.

Alejo Carpentier