The 66 best phrases of Almudena Grandes
Almudena Grandes is one of the best known and most acclaimed Spanish writers. Her elegant and lyrical prose has catapulted her to fame.
Almudena Grandes's phrases express great sensitivity towards everyday stories, towards the different nuances that can color our way of experiencing emotions, and towards the way in which relationships change us.
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The best phrases of Almudena Grandes
Next we will see a selection of text fragments, reflections and phrases by this writer.
1. They are not corpses yet and they are scared to death ...
About the paradoxes of existence: breathing is not synonymous with living.
2. You have to be very brave to ask for help, you know? But you have to be even more courageous to accept it.
About the burden that pride can be for us.
3. The mother superior would repeat it every two by three, the branches must be pulled out before they reach trunks.
Bad habits must be tackled as soon as possible.
4. Omitting the truths is nothing more than a refined variety of the lie.
Morally, knowingly hiding information is being untrue.
5. Just a Spanish story, the kind that spoils everything.
One of Almudena Grandes' phrases that show her tragic vision of the country.
6. The same love that made us loyal, that made us better, was spoiling everything.
Depending on the context, the same emotions can be constructive or destructive.
- Related article: "The 8 types of emotions (classification and description)"
7. Many things happened that night, words, gestures, silences that she would remember all her life from him.
A sample of the stylized prose of Almudena Grandes.
8. (...) That sad smell, of moss and wet earth, that perfumes the buildings under construction.
About a very concrete feeling.
9. How weird are your brothers-in-law, right? -Yes, they are from Madrid. -Will that.
A taste of her sense of humor.
10. It had been too much love, as much as I could give, more than was good for me. It was too much love. And then nothing.
Looking back at an elation.
11. Therefore, we can only say with certainty that the whole equals the sum of the parts when the parts ignore each other.
Another reflection on the way in which conflicts and indifference for the other destroy the social fabric.
12. A good writer can write about anything and he can write literature on any subject, and a bad writer doesn't have that ability.
A tip about this artistic side.
13. Time will put everything in its place, I will die and you will regret what you told me a moment ago, but until then I am not willing to lose you ...
When emotions are above the rational and conscious analysis of things.
14. The earth revolved on itself and around the sun just below our naked, bonded bodies. Beyond was everything else. Beyond was the winter, the ice, the slippery and dirty condition of an ugly, earthy snow, stained with mud and only half undone by the footprints of the road. people, many innocent and guilty, loyal and treacherous people, aware or not of the wound that their steps were opening on the frozen sidewalks of the future of their children, of their grandchildren, a guilty, desolate horizon, distinct from the clean, cunningly wrapped landscape in a pretty brightly colored paper they would once believe inherit.
Description passage more focused on the sensations than on the material.
15. Watching him sleep next to her, she could only think of one thing; tomorrow I may not have it, tomorrow it will be gone, tomorrow I will be alone in this bed... Every minute weighed, every minute mattered, every minute stretched out until it was projected into the limits of a small, personal eternity.
About anticipated fear of loss.
16. What is it for? Well, to understand how things happen. Does it seem little to you? To try to formulate rules that alleviate the unbearable anguish of our existence in this miserable blade of the immeasurable immensity of the universe that is the world.
About the different ways in which we reduce the degree of uncertainty.
17. I loved her so much that at that moment, while I felt that I was left without soil under my feet and the emptiness was charging in the center of my stomach a much higher price than the pleasure of all vertigo, the certainty that I would never feel disgust or shame again when remembering the luminous disproportion of her naked body, managed to keep a thread of warmth in my heart numb with cold.
This text fragment expresses an example of traditional romantic love, based largely on the unconditional bond.
18. What savagery, what horror the exile, and this horrible defeat that never ends, and destroys outside and inside, and erases the plans of the inner cities, and perverts the rules of love, and overflows the limits of hatred to turn the good and the bad into a single thing, ugly, and cold, and fiery, immobile, what horror this immobile life, this river that does not flow, that never finds a sea where be lost.
A text with great expressive power by this writer.
19. Joy had made me strong, because (...) it had taught me that there is no work, no effort, no guilt, no problems, no lawsuits, not even mistakes that are not worth facing when the goal, in the end, is the joy.
On the strength of the spirit of hard work.
20. Although the deserts bloom very slowly, the grass sprouts before in the ground than in the gaze of those who contemplate it, and that is why the time, a long time, for someone to remember one fine day that apples do not grow on the ground, that apples necessarily fall from the trees.
Even where there appears to be only destruction, the seed of creation resides.
21. Then it would be she who would cry, she who would despair, she who would learn to pay for herself the true price of beautiful things.
The dialectic of suffering in relationships: it is not always the same person who loses the most.
22. He was still convinced that he had seen her there for the first time, Raquel Fernández Perea, without cheating, without decorations, without excuses, perhaps a beauty more beautiful than her masks.
Almudena Grandes talks about an intimate look at the person beyond her imposture.
23. The difference between eroticism and pornography, apart from the etymological one, has to do with the attitude of the receiver of the message, it has to do with the attitude of the reader.
In cultural products, it is not only the product itself that matters, but also the expectations and role of those who consume them.
24. The expectation of happiness is more intense than the happiness itself, but the pain of a consummate defeat always exceeds the intensity predicted in its worst calculations.
A tragic asymmetry.
25. Since I was little I have always wanted to be a writer, I do not remember myself wanting to be something else, because since I was little what I have liked the most in this life is reading.
An autobiographical note by this artist.
26. All I wanted was to grow old next to her, see her face when I woke up every morning, see her face a moment before I fell asleep every night, and die before her.
Almudena describes here romantic aspirations that are very common.
- You may be interested: "How do your expectations influence your relationship with your partner?"
27. I think the first novels are always strange because when you write your first book you don't even know if you are writing a book or a text that is going to end up in a drawer.
About the experience of writing the first works in the world of literature.
28. There was everything, and everything was worth while a vague, universal excitement ran through the veins of the assistants as a shiny and thick liquid, capable of making your blood.
The description of a context of debauchery.
29. To write before you have to read. Starting to write is a consequence of having read a lot, it is like going through the mirror, like when Alice goes through the mirror. Reading and writing are mirror acts.
It is necessary to expand one's own cultural level to have something to say.
30. We had been happy walking a tightrope, we had flourished in an infection of contradictions, we had found ourselves in a maze of paradoxes without ever looking at the ground, never looking at the sky, without look.
About a situation in which sensations reign and their intensity hides the need for planning.
31. Some image that I am stumbling over, almost accidentally, warns me that it has a story behind it. And what I do is turn these images that promise a story around until I can find a way to open it, although it doesn't always happen.
This snippet tells us about a very personal way of seeing patterns in seemingly simple or chaotic information.
32. You have to write about what is known, about what is close to you and what interests you. Then what happens is the miracle of communication, which is based on the principle that all human beings are basically very similar.
To truly convey Talk about what has emotional implications for yourself.
33. All human beings are alike because they are vulgar creatures, very simple after all. And among the things they have in common, there is not only sex.
The personality of each individual imprints very relative differences between each one of us.
34. Humans are beings who desire and despair takes away their own essence, desiccates them, disembowels them, ruins them, expels them from themselves along the temperate and deceptive path that leads to the fate of things, to the exhaustion of dusty vegetables, of buried minerals and inert.
A reflection on the human condition.
35. We were all afraid, the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated, we were all very afraid.
There are situations in which fear does not understand classes.
36. The last days of summer everyone got very sad, so much so that Raquel felt that they did not return, but left, that they were exiled from the bougainvilleas and the oleanders, the orange and olive trees, the smell of the sea and the boats in the port, the whitewashed walls and the white houses, the windows flowered and the shade of the vines, the gold of the oil, the silver of the sardines, the subtle mysteries of saffron and cinnamon, their own language and the color, of the sun, of light, of blue, because for them to return was not to return home, because they could only return to Spain, although no one ever dared to say that word.
A narrative fragment full of expressiveness.
37. It has been a long time, they will tell me, and they will be right, but we all still have the dust of the dictatorship on our shoes, you too, even if you don't know it.
The psychological residue that leave certain historical traumas takes time to leave.
- You may be interested: "What is trauma and how does it influence our lives?"
38. It is the others to be afraid of, the ones who let you guess which way they are looking. Those are the ones who always look in the opposite direction to what you imagine.
Uncertainty about the intentions of others can be a source of fear.
39. We are all fooled at the same time, and not because we are stupid, but because good people are easy to fool.
It is not possible to know everything, and therefore we manage our ignorance.
40. Education, education and education, they said; it was like a motto, a slogan repeated many times, the magic formula to fix the world, to change things, to make people happy. They had lost everything, they had gotten ahead working in positions that were far below their capacities, academies, bakeries, telephone switchboards, but that was left to them. They always had that.
One point of view can lead to claim only education, leaving other needs unattended.
41. Fear also excludes dignity, generosity, a sense of justice, and even reaches impair intelligence, because it alters the perception of reality and lengthens the shadows of all things. Cowardly people are even afraid of themselves.
Fear removes many human virtues.
42. Beauty is a monster, a bloody deity that must be appeased with constant sacrifices.
Aesthetics can become obsessive.
43. Then he thought that silence perhaps weighs more on those who are silent than uncertainty on those who do not know.
The fact of not being able to express yourself it can be more painful than feeling ignorance.
44. Because there are hungers much worse than having nothing to eat, bad weather much more cruel than not having a roof under which to shelter, poverties more suffocating than life in a house without doors, without tiles or lamps. She didn't know it, but I did.
A reflection on the cruel side of life.
45. Normally, when I write a novel or a collection of stories, I usually start from images: I walk down the street and I value every person I don't know as a character; each new situation, as an argument; Every place I haven't been, I value it as a setting.
A comment on the creative process.
46. It's funny how when someone writes an erotic novel everyone assumes that he has a tremendously intense [sexual] life and when someone writes murder novels no one assumes that his neighbor has been killed, nor is it assumed that a writer who writes science fiction has had contacts in the third phase.
The sense of humor applied to the way in which we perceive the relationship between art and artist.
47. Finishing a novel is something dramatic. The longer it takes to write the endings, the more I suffer. Achieving the end of a novel has something of a pulse, because you have been able to with it. Finishing it is like being evicted from your home. I confess that one of the most terrible moments of my life is the day after finishing a novel.
Another of Almudena Grandes' phrases about how writing has lived.
48. It was too much love. Too big, too complicated, too confusing, and risky, and fruitful, and painful. As much as I could give, more than was good for me. That's why it broke. It didn't run out, it didn't run out, it didn't die, it just broke, it fell apart like too high a tower, like too high a stake, like too high a hope.
Recap of a love story.
49. She didn't say anything, she kept smiling. She reached out and turned the ignition key. The engine started. The windows were foggy. It must have been freezing outside, a curtain of steam leaking from the hood. He leaned back against the seat, looked at me, and I realized that the world was falling apart, the world was falling apart.
Fragment of a passage full of feelings.
50. I stayed sitting on her knees. He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me. The mere contact of her tongue reverberated throughout my body. My back shook. He is the reason for my life, I thought. It was an old, trite thought, formulated hundreds of times in her absence, violently rejected in recent times, as poor, petty, and pathetic.
Another of Almudena Grandes' texts based on the romantic.
51. The maturity in my work is that now when I start a novel I know it one hundred percent. I have a notebook with the story resolved and the structure closed, I know how many chapters it has, what happens in each one and even how many pages will it have and until that moment I do not feel to write. But then there is an inherent emotion in writing, it is an adventure and when you feel like writing it can happen, that what you have decided before is useless.
A comment on the artistic evolution of the writer.
52. The verb to believe is a special verb, the widest and the narrowest of all verbs.
A phrase that invites reflection about your own expectations.
53. Not so long ago, in this same neighborhood, happiness was also a way of resisting.
The portrait of a life linked to the local.
54. María Gracia is also alone. She has also been married, has not had children, she has also been abandoned by her partner, has not found another, she has also lived better, has never lived worse than now.
This text shows the lyrical style in which the writer portrays many of her characters.
55. When she started working, she was already tired, but that was an advantage and not a disadvantage. The routine of the house, the children, the meetings of parents of students, the Christmas costumes, the carnival, the end of the year, the appointments with the tutors, the vaccination schedule and everything else, he used up it in such a way that the weekdays did not seem like it so much.
A way of turn negative life situations around.
56. If I were younger I would not be so worried, because for crises, which I have had to suck, my son. But we could, we were strong, we were used to suffering, to emigrating, to fighting.
About a life marked by struggle.
57. But we Spaniards, who for many centuries knew how to be poor with dignity, had never known how to be docile.
A look at the history of Spain.
58. Since nothing is free, the brandy has assigned it to another race. Now he looks like a red skin, his face is red in general, especially his cheekbones, full of broken veins that branch out day after day to conquer the base of his nose.
An original description.
59. Because action is the enemy of reflection and I couldn't think anymore.
A way of explaining someone's behavior from a duality.
60. We are in a neighborhood in the center of Madrid. Its name does not matter, because it could be anyone among a few old neighborhoods, with venerable areas, others rather old. This one does not have many monuments but it is one of the beautiful ones, because it is alive.
There is an aesthetic quality that goes beyond the material.
61. I knew it was not exactly like that, that was not true, but the truth also disappeared, and I I kept thinking the same thing, and it was nice, I felt someone, safe, at times like that, it was curious.
Forgetfulness can lead to self-deception.
62. And I was alone, I felt alone, unable to speak, which is perhaps the worst form of loneliness.
A reflection about loneliness.
63. To be a female is to have female skin, two X chromosomes, and the ability to conceive and feed the offspring that the male of the species engenders. And nothing else, because everything else is culture.
About sex differences.
64. Thirty years ago children inherited poverty, but also the dignity of their parents, a way of being poor without feeling humiliated, without ceasing to be worthy or fighting for the future.
A nuance about the different ways of experiencing misery.
65. Self-pity is a very harsh drug.
She can be addictive.
66. Immortal history does strange things when it intersects with the love of mortal bodies.
The contradiction between what is perpetual and what has an expiration date.
