Quotes from a Literary Birthday Celebrant

Rainy days always lead me to tumblr. One of the tumblrs I am following published a commemorative post for  the 465th birthday of Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote de La Mancha. While I have never read the novel, I grew up listening to my parents tell me the story over and over again. Don Quixote was also the first movie my parents took me to see in the annual Spanish Film Festival help by Instituto Cervantes, the Spanish language center set up by the Spanish Embassy. So the story of the delusional nobleman who travels across the countryside with his servant, Sancho Panza, to fight monster-windmills holds a special place in my heart.

Miguel de Cevantes

(c) anniecarbo.tumblr.com

The tumblr post listed down a number of notable quotes (translated to English) from the great Spanish writer which I would like to share:

1. "The pen is the tongue of the mind."

2. "In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd."

3. "By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom."

4. "It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth."

5."The pen is the language of the soul; as the concepts that in it are generated, such will be its writings."

6. "Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within."

Until always,

lemonjuicesodapop