Top 33 Javier Marias Quotes
#1. Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.
Javier Marias
#2. Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what's going on, our ears don't have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can't hide from what they sense they're about to hear, it's always too late.
Javier Marias
#3. There are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?
Javier Marias
#4. We don't object to our date of birth, so why object to our date of death, which is just as much a matter of chance.
Javier Marias
#5. It's so sad that no one writes down the things we go through, and even worse - no one will ever know about it, no one will ever see or hear about it, no one will ever be able to restore.
Javier Marias
#6. We don't care about humiliating ourselves to ourselves, after all, no one is going to judge us and there are no witnesses.
Javier Marias
#7. Everything can be ridiculous or tragic according to who is doing the telling or how they tell it.
Javier Marias
#8. The books we don't read are full of warnings; we will either never read them or they will arrive too late.
Javier Marias
#9. He had a penchant for idioms, sayings, proverbs and the like; some of which he invented or used in a way that was incomprehensible to me,
Javier Marias
#10. Cromer-Blake has always introduced Dayanand, the Indian doctor, as a great friend which, of course, equips him
indeed is the ideal qualification
to become the most bitter of enemies.
Javier Marias
#11. Why do you think politicians send soldiers to the wars they declare, if, of course, they still go to the bother of declaring them ... mediation, keeping a distance from the actual events and being privileged enough not to have to witness them.
Javier Marias
#12. One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.
Javier Marias
#13. Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.
Javier Marias
#14. I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.
Javier Marias
#15. We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.
Javier Marias
#16. Stubbed it out in the ashtray she had been using before, for her equally
Javier Marias
#17. What remains mysterious, or even enigmatic are those two words "nothing more," "pas davantage" in French.
Javier Marias
#18. Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it's hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it's true.
Javier Marias
#19. I never get involved in anything and I don't make enemies either, I keep myself to myself.
Javier Marias
#20. Some people think that being in love or infatuated is a modern invention that appears only in novels. Be that as it may, it nevertheless exists, the invention, the word, and our capacity for such a feeling.
Javier Marias
#21. Fiction has the ability to show us what we don't know and what doesn't happen.
Javier Marias
#22. The certainty that someone will never come back," the narrator muses of the dead, "never speak again, never take another step ... will never look at us or look away. I don't know how we bear it, or how we recover.
Javier Marias
#23. When the abuse is mutual, it dissolves of its own accord, the way it does in quarrels between brothers and sister when they are still young. Or else it accumulates, until the next time
Javier Marias
#24. Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.
Javier Marias
#25. 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.
Javier Marias
#26. Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous.
Javier Marias
#27. The most transient and trivial of infatuations lack any real cause, and that's even truer of feelings that go far deeper, infinitely deeper than that.
Javier Marias
#28. We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.
Javier Marias
#30. An odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.
Javier Marias
#31. Illusions are important. What you foresee or what you remember can be as important as what really happens.
Javier Marias
#32. Not to gain time, but maybe to lose it, to see it pass.
Javier Marias
#33. (None of us can ever know for sure who we are going to die with.)
Javier Marias
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