The 66 best phrases of Almudena Grandes
Almudena Grandes is one of the most well-known and acclaimed Spanish writers. His elegant prose and lyrical character has catapulted her to fame.
The phrases of Almudena Grandes 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 fragments of text, reflections and phrases of 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 braver to accept it.
About the burden that pride can be for us.
3. The mother superior repeated it every two times, you have to tear off the branches before they reach the trunks.
Bad habits should be stopped as soon as possible.
4. Omitting truths is nothing other than a refined variety of lying.
Morally, knowingly hiding information is untruthful.
5. Only a Spanish history, one of those that spoil everything.
One of the phrases of Almudena Grandes that show his tragic vision of the country.
6. The same love that made us loyal, that made us better, was throwing everything to lose.
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 he would remember all his life.
A sample of the stylized prose of Almudena Grandes.
8. (...) That sad smell, moss and wet earth, that perfumes the buildings under construction.
About a very specific feeling.
9. How rare are your brothers-in-law, right? -Yes, it's that they're from Madrid. -Will that.
A sample of his sense of humor.
10. It had been too much love, as much as the one I could give, more than it suited me. It was too much love. And then, nothing.
Retrospective look towards an elation.
11. Therefore, we can only affirm with certainty that the whole is equal to the sum of the parts when the parties ignore each other.
Another reflection on the way in which conflicts and indifference to the other destroys the social fabric.
12. A good writer can write about anything and can do literature on any subject and a bad writer does not have that ability.
A tip about this artistic facet.
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 around itself and around the sun just below our naked and bonded bodies. Beyond was everything else. Beyond it was the winter, the ice, the slippery and dirty condition of an ugly, earthy snow, muddy and only half-broken by the footsteps of the people, many innocent and guilty people, loyal and treacherous, conscious or not of the wound that their footsteps were opening on the frozen sidewalks of the future of their children, of their grandchildren, a guilty horizon, desolate, different from the clean landscape and shrouded with cunning in a beautiful role of bright colors that once they thought they would inherit.
Passage description more focused on the sensations than on the material.
15. When I saw him sleeping beside him, he could only think of one thing; tomorrow maybe I will 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 until projecting itself within the limits of a small, personal eternity.
About anticipated fear of loss .
16. What is it for? Well to understand how things happen. Do you think little? To try to formulate rules that alleviate the unbearable anguish of our existence in this miserable wisp of the immeasurable immensity of the universe that is the world.
On 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 had no floor under my feet and the emptiness was charged in the center of my stomach a price much higher than the pleasure of all vertigo, the certainty that never I would feel disgust and shame again, remembering the luminous disproportion of her naked body, I managed to keep a strand of heat in my heart numb with cold.
This fragment of text expresses an example of traditional romantic love, based largely on the unconditional bond.
18What a savage, what a horror of exile, and this horrible defeat that never ends, and destroys the outside and inside, and erases the planes of inner cities, and perverts the rules of love, and overcomes the limits of hatred to convert the good and the bad in one thing, ugly, and cold, and ardent, immobile, what a horror this immobile life, this river that does not flow, that never finds a sea where to get lost.
A text with great expressive power by this writer.
19. Joy had made me strong, because (...) I had been taught that there is no work, no effort, no guilt, no problems, no lawsuits, not even mistakes that are not worth facing when the goal is finally It is joy.
On the strength that confers the spirit of hard work.
20. Although the deserts flourish very slowly, the grass springs up earlier on the ground than in the eyes of those who contemplate it, and that is why the time has to pass, a lot of time, for someone to remember one day that the apples do not grow in the earth, that the apples necessarily fall from the trees.
Even where there only seems to be destruction lies the seed of creation.
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. I was still convinced that I had seen her there for the first time, Raquel Fernández Perea, without traps, without decorations, without excuses, perhaps a beauty more beautiful than her masks.
Almudena Grandes talks about an intimate look towards the person beyond their impostures.
23. The difference between eroticism and pornography, apart from the etymology, has to do with the attitude of the recipient of the message, it has to do with the attitude of the reader.
In cultural products not only the product itself, but also the expectations and the role of the user.
24. The expectation of happiness is more intense than 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've always wanted to be a writer, I do not remember myself wanting to be something else, because since I was a little girl what I liked the most in this life is reading.
An autobiographical note of this artist.
26. All I wanted was to grow old by her side, see her face when she woke up every morning, see her face a moment before falling asleep every night, and die before her.
Almudena describes here romantic aspirations that are very common .
- Maybe you're interested: "How do your expectations influence your relationship?"
27. I think that the first novels are always strange because when you write your first book you do not even know if you are writing a book or a text that will 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 audience as a bright and thick liquid, able to make brighter, thicker blood.
The description of a context of debauchery.
29. To write before has had to read. Starting to write is a consequence of having read a lot, it is like going through the mirror, as when Alicia crosses the mirror. Reading and writing are speculative acts.
It is necessary to expand one's cultural level to have something to say.
30. We had been happy walking on a tightrope, we had blossomed 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 looking.
About a situation in which sensations reign and their intensity hides the need for planning.
31. Some image with which I stumble, almost unintentionally, tells me that it has a story behind it. And what I do is to spin these images that promise a story until I can find a way to open it, although it does not always happen.
This fragment tells us about a very personal way of seeing patterns in the apparently simple or chaotic information.
32. It is necessary to write about what is known, about what one is close to and what one is interested in. Then what happens is the miracle of communication, which is based on the principle that all human beings are basically very similar.
To really transmit we have to talk about what has emotional implications for oneself.
33. All human beings are similar because they are vulgar creatures, very simple after all. And among the things they have in common, it's not just sex.
The personality of each individual prints very relative differences between each one of us.
34. Humans are beings that desire and desperation takes away their own essence, drains them, gut them, ruins them, expels them from themselves by the temperate and deceptive path that leads to the destiny of things, to the fatigue of vegetables dusty, of the buried and inert minerals.
A reflection on the human condition.
35. We were all afraid, the rich and the poor, the cultured and the uneducated, all very afraid.
There are situations in which fear does not understand classes.
36. The last days of summer all became very sad, so much so that Rachel felt that they did not return, but left, that they exiled from the bougainvillea and the oleanders, the orange trees and the olive trees, the smell of the sea and of the ships of the port, of the whitewashed walls and of the white houses, of the flowered windows and the shade of the vines, of the gold of the oil, of the silver of the sardines, of the subtle mysteries of saffron and cinnamon, of their own language and color, of the sun, of the light, of the blue, because for them to return was not to return home, because one could only return to Spain, although nobody dared to say that word.
A narrative fragment full of expressiveness.
37. It's been a long time, they'll tell me, and they'll be right, but we all still carry the dust of dictatorship in our shoes, you too, even if you do not know it.
The psychological deposit that they leave certain historical traumas It takes to leave.
- You may be interested: "What is trauma and how does it influence our lives?"
38. It's the others you have to be afraid of, those who let you guess which side they're looking at. Those are the ones who always look in the opposite direction to what you imagine.
Uncertainty about the intentions of the rest can be a source of fear.
39. We all fool ourselves at the same time, and not because we are fools, but because good people are easy to deceive.
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 gone ahead working in positions that were far below their capacities, academies, bakeries, telephone switchboards, but they had that left. They always had that.
A point of view can lead to claiming education alone, leaving other needs unattended.
41. Fear also excludes dignity, generosity, the sense of justice, and even harms the intelligence, because it alters the perception of reality and lengthens the shadows of all things. Cowardly people are afraid even of themselves.
Fear eliminates many human virtues.
42. Beauty is a monster, a bloody deity that must be placated with constant sacrifices.
The aesthetic can become obsessed.
43. Then he thought that silence perhaps weighs on those who are silent rather than the uncertainty in those who do not know.
The fact of not being able to express oneself it can be more painful than feeling ignorance .
44. Because there are much worse famines than having nothing to eat, bad weather much more cruel than lacking a roof under which to shelter, poverty more suffocating than life in a house without doors, without tiles or lamps. She did not 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 with images: I walk down the street and every person I do not know I value as a character; each new situation, as an argument; Every place I have not been, I value it as a stage.
A comment on the creative process.
46. It's funny how when someone writes an erotic novel everyone supposes that he has a tremendously intense [sexual] life and when someone writes murder novels nobody assumes that he has charged his neighbor, nor is a writer who writes science supposed to 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 later I write the endings, the more I suffer. Achieving the end of a novel has something of a pulse, because you have been able to do it. Finishing it is as if you were evicted from your home. I confess that one of the most terrible moments of my life is the day after finishing a novel.
Another one of Almudena Grandes's sentences about how writing has lived.
48. It was too much love. Too big, too complicated, too confusing, and risky, and fertile, and painful. As much as I could give, more than what suited me. That's why it broke. It did not run out, it did not end, it did not die, it just broke, it came down like a tower too high, like a bet too high, like too high a hope.
Recapitulation of a loving story .
49. He did not say anything, he was still smiling. He reached out and turned the ignition key. The engine started. The crystals were fogged. It must be freezing outside, a curtain of steam escaping from the hood. He leaned back against the seat, looked at me, and I realized that the world was coming down, the world was coming down.
Fragment of a passage full of feelings.
50. I sat on his knees. He put his arms around me and kissed me.The only contact of his tongue reverberated throughout my body. My back shuddered. He is the reason of my life, I thought. It was an old thought, trite, formulated hundreds of times in his absence, violently rejected in recent times, poor, mean and pathetic.
Another of the texts of Almudena Grandes based on the romantic.
51. The maturity in my work is that now when I start a novel I know it a 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 it will have and until that moment I do not feel like writing. But then there is an inherent emotion in the writing, it is an adventure and when you feel writing 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 on one's own expectations.
53. Not so long ago, in this same neighborhood, happiness was also a way to resist.
The portrait of a life linked to the local.
54. María Gracia is also alone. She has also been married, she has not had children either, her partner has abandoned her, she has not found another, she has also lived better, she has never lived worse than now.
This text shows the lyrical style in which the writer portrays many of her characters.
55. When I started working, I was already tired, but that was an advantage and not an inconvenience. The routine of the house, the children, the meetings of parents of pupils, the costumes of Christmas, carnival, the end of the course, the appointments with the tutors, the vaccination calendar and everything else, exhausted it in such a way that the working days did not seem so.
a way to turn around the negative situations of life .
56. If I were younger I would not be so worried, because for crises, the ones I had to suck myself, my son. But we could, we were strong, we were used to suffer, to emigrate, to fight.
On a life marked by struggle.
57. But the 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 him to another race. Now it looks like a red skin, reddish face in general, especially his cheekbones, full of broken veins that branch day after day to conquer and the base of his nose.
An original description.
59. Because action is the enemy of reflection and could no longer think.
A way to explain someone's behavior from a duality.
60. We are in a neighborhood in the center of Madrid. His name does not matter, because it could be any of a few old neighborhoods, with venerable areas, others rather old. This does not have many monuments but it is beautiful, 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 kept thinking the same, and it was nice, I felt someone, sure, at times like that, it was curious.
Oblivion 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 woman is to have the skin of a woman, two X chromosomes and the ability to conceive and feed the offspring that the male of the species breeds. And nothing else, because everything else is culture.
About sexual differences.
64. Thirty years ago, children inherited poverty, but also the dignity of their parents, a way of being poor without feeling humiliated, without being worthy or fighting for the future.
A nuance about the different ways of experiencing misery.
65. Self-pity is a very hard drug.
It can be addictive.
66. The immortal story does strange things when it intersects with the love of the mortal bodies.
The contradiction between the perpetual and what has an expiration date.
