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Machado de Assis Quotes
1839–1908 Brazil
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (June 21, 1839 – September 29, 1908) was a Brazilian writer most famous for his innovative novels and short stories, though he was also a poet, dramatist and translator. Generally acclaimed as the greatest figure in Brazilian literature, he founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its first president.
Brazil Novelists Playwrights Poets Short story writers Also known as: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Random Machado de Assis quote
13 quotes
Life is so beautiful that even the idea of death must be born before it can be realized.
Dom Casmurro (1899)
The best definition of love in the world is not worth one kiss from the girl you love.
There is truly only one misfortune: that of not being born.
As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881)
Life…is an enormous lottery: the prizes are few, the failures innumerable. Out of the sighs of one generation are kneaded the hopes of the next. That's life.
Teoria do medalhão (1881)
The greatest sin, after the initial sin, is its publication.
Quincas Borba (1891)
How many wicked intentions climb aboard a pure and innocent phrase, after it is already on its way! It is enough to make one suspect that lying is, many a time, as involuntary as breathing.
Dom Casmurro (1899)
Besides, I like epitaphs. Among civilized people they're an expression of that pious and secret selfishness that induces us to pull out of death a shred at least of the shade that has passed on.
As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881)
Imagination has been the companion of my whole existence – lively, swift, restless, at times timid and balky, most often ready to devour plain upon plain in its course.
Dom Casmurro (1899)
I even thought her heart taught me something, in spite of its inexperience, or perhaps precisely because of it, for in matters of love one unlearns with practice, and the novice is the learned one.
Primas de Sapucaia! (1883)
He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.
Iaiá Garcia (1878)
I had no children. I haven't transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature.
Man is...a thinking erratum, that's what he is. Every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before and which will also be corrected itself until the definitive edition, which the publisher gives to the worms gratis.
As Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881)
Destiny is not only a dramatist, it is also its own stage manager. That is, it sets the entrances of the characters on scene, gives them letters and other objects, and produces the off-stage noises to go with the dialogue: thunder, a carriage, a shot.
Dom Casmurro (1899)
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