21 Quotes by Alejo Carpentier

In America everything is fantastical.

The anxious wait lasted four years, and the alert ears never despaired of hearing, at any moment, the voice of the great conch shell which would bellow through the hills to announce to all that Macandal had completed the cycle of his metamorphoses, and stood poised once more, sinewy and hard, with testicles like rocks, on his own human legs" (36-37).

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).

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

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).

El adolescente padecía como nunca, en aquel momento, la sensación de encierro que produce vivir en una isla; estar en una tierra sin caminos a otras tierras a donde se pudiera llegar rodando, cabalgando, caminando, pasando fronteras, durmiendo en albergues de un día, en un vagar sin más norte que el antojo, la fascinación ejercida por una montaña pronto desdeñada por la visión de otra montaña(…)

Y comprendía, ahora, que el hombre nunca sabe para quién padece y espera. Padece y espera y trabaja para gentes que nunca conocerá, y que a su vez padecerán y esperarán y trabajarán para otros que tampoco serán felices, pues el hombre ansía siempre una felicidad situada más allá de la porción que le es otorgada.

Había llegado a pedir - lo cual aprobaba el joven- que la guillotina se instalara en la misma sala de los tribunales, para que no se perdiera tiempo entre la sentencia y la ejecución.

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.