Reinaldo Arenas Quotes

#1. Leonardo da Vinci was homosexual, so was Michelangelo, Socrates, Shakespeare, and almost every other figure that has formed what we have come to understand as beauty.

Reinaldo Arenas

#2. Cuba will be free. I already am.

Reinaldo Arenas

#3. I have always considered it despicable to grovel for your life as if life were a favor. If you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living

Reinaldo Arenas

#4. These, to be sure, were farfetched hopes, hopes born of despair, but hope is, after all, mostly for the desperate.

Reinaldo Arenas

#5. All the literature of this century is somewhat burdened by the theme of uprootedness.

Reinaldo Arenas

#6. Like a lightning bug ... Like a lightning bug? ... Yes, just like a night lightning bug; because there are day lightning bugs too - even if nobody has ever seen one, I know there are some, and I know the day lightning bugs are the cockroaches that since they can't light up, people kill them.

Reinaldo Arenas

#7. My sexual activity was all with animals. First there were the hens, then the goats and the sows, and after I had grown up some more, the mares.

Reinaldo Arenas

#8. Trees have a secret life that is only revealed to those willing to climb them.

Reinaldo Arenas

#9. Being a fugitive living in the woods at the time, I had to write before it got dark. Now darkness was approaching again, only more insidiously.

Reinaldo Arenas

#10. To discover a city is in itself a unique event, but when we have the privilege of sharing it with friends most dear to us, it becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Reinaldo Arenas

#11. All this had already given us an inkling of what the new regime was about. There was still some hope, however. There is always some hope, especially for cowards. I was one of them, one of those cowardly or hopeful young men who still thought the government had something to offer.

Reinaldo Arenas

#12. Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.

Reinaldo Arenas