42 Quotes by Antonio Muñoz Molina

He had so little experience, or so little capacity for real introspection, he didn't imagine the guilt and anguish lying in wait; he didn't even ask himself what Judith Biely might be feeling. She didn't exist for him in an autonomous, complete way but only as a projection of his own desire

The attraction of an exotic presence that was intensely carnal and at the same time as intangible as a promise was contained not in her attitude or words but in her very presence, the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes, the timbre of her voice, and something else not in her, the promise of so many unfulfilled and often unformed desires in him, roused by her proximity as if by a clap of hands or a voice revealing the dimension of a great area of darkness.

لم تكن تهمه كثيرًا القصة التي كانت ترويها له: ما كان يهمه هو صوتها، لا كلماتها، وجودها لا السبب الذي جعله يعثر عليها هناك.

...Ignacio Abel feels a weariness he doesn't remember having experienced before, all the more evident in the presence of someone younger (but he didn't feel the age difference when he was with Judith; how strange to have lived so long in a state of total unawareness, to have thought himself immune to the years, to weakness, to death)

After so much time he was still searching as he had then, hoping for something he couldn't name but that corroded or undermined his stability of thought, not allowing him real rest, injecting doubt and suspicion into the evident satisfaction or everything he'd achieved

I've thought a great deal about the things I'd say to you, if I saw you again, but now I don't like having said any of it. We talk and words betray us. You think of them and when you say them out loud they mean something else.

What had excited most about her from the start was what made him most afraid and what had eventually taken her away from him: the strength of her will.

But he didn't have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory

He'd forgotten the sensation of novely, the thrill of desiring a woman so intensely it was pure magnetism of her female presence that made him tremble, more than her physical beauty or the slightly exotic elegance of her dress or the spontaneity with which she had leaned on his arm, holding it tighter when a speeding care passed close to them