15 quotes
He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.
The City of Palaces (2014)
He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural.
The City of Palaces (2014)
[Alicia] "What is false does not become true simply because people shout it. What is right does not change because it is inconvenient."
The City of Palaces (2014)
[Madero] "An eye for an eye ends in blindness."
The City of Palaces (2014)
[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life."
The City of Palaces (2014)
[Miguel Sarmiento] "The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects."
The City of Palaces (2014)
While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity.
The City of Palaces (2014)
The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father's tiny script.
The City of Palaces (2014)
[Alicia Gavilán, to Miguel] "We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing."
The City of Palaces (2014)
[Her elderly mother, to Alicia] "Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die."
The City of Palaces (2014)
The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary.
The City of Palaces (2014)
Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks.
The City of Palaces (2014)
..."a male with a woman's psyche"...
The City of Palaces (2014)
But something terrible had happened - she had become old.
The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs.
The City of Palaces (2014)
[Padre Cáceres, to Miguel Sarmiento] "Poor people are not simply a set of diseases or potential diseases, Señor Doctor. They are human souls. If you wish to change their habits, you must learn what those habits are and why they have acquired them. You must meet the people."
The City of Palaces (2014)