18 quotes
Layla’s story, though not always accurate, was far more interesting than the truth.
A Mask for the General (1987)
You really can’t choose the people you’re going to like.
A Mask for the General (1987)
They passed a closed police station. Someone had written on the wall, “It is forbidden to forbid.”
Suddenly he didn’t care if the revolution were lost or won, only that it be over.
I’ve got to live up to their expectations by acting irresponsibly again.
Your father was a very wise man. But you cannot acquire his wisdom by pretending to have it already.
The Red Magician (1982)
“You can’t ask questions like that,” André said. “The unconscious has its own logic.” But he looked a little puzzled, a little too tied to the world of logic and order.
Collective insanity is boring. Individual insanity—that’s what interests me.
She felt that she had seen beneath the mask of the world, and she could not quite believe in that mask again.
The Red Magician (1982)
Maybe art couldn’t survive it if was sponsored by the government. Maybe art always had to be subversive.
A Mask for the General (1987)
You think you know what your life will be like thirty years from now and suddenly you’re doing something you couldn’t have planned five minutes ago.
That’s what’s missing, she thought. Everyone in the city is so passionate about things. Here they are only passionate about their religion. They’ve lost everything else.
Tourists (1989)
Movies should be silent, like dreams.
You think you can be as heroic as he was, simply by dying. But he doesn’t take courage to die. That’s easy. It takes courage to live.
The Red Magician (1982)
She sat silent for a moment. The real world always lay out there waiting, ready to ambush you with something you could not control. The history you’ve made up for your own private kingdom turns out to be the national epic of some obscure country.
Tourists (1989)
Three of her children were in school. At some time the government had recorded that Mama had three children of school age, so every day Mama sent three different children off to school. The teachers never seemed to notice.
Tourists (1989)
“A novel?” André laughed. “The novel’s dead—don’t waste your time. The novel takes a small—oh, infinitely small—cut-and-dried section of so-called reality and calls it art. Your life is art. Don’t waste it trying to write a novel.”
A magician’s business is with words. He may use other things to help him along—amulets and so forth—but it is within words that the power lies. To choose the wrong words may mean death. And so magicians learn, from the first, to use as few words as possible, to answer as few questions as we can.
The Red Magician (1982)