40 phrases by Érico Veríssimo for those who love to appreciate national literature

Time makes us forget. There are people who forget quickly. Others just pretend they don’t remember anymore.

In my opinion there are two types of travellers: those who travel to escape and those who travel to seek.

The thread that holds your faith must be of the best steel and therefore strong and flexible at the same time. Faith without flexibility, faith without doubt can end in fanaticism.

I think it’s very dangerous for a man to take himself too seriously.

No writer can create from nothing. Even when he doesn’t know it, he is using lived experiences, read or heard, and even sensed by a kind of sixth sense.

What makes us choose a lukewarm life? The answer is stamped in the distance and coldness of the smiles, in the laxity of the hugs, in the indifference of the good morning, almost whispered.

Love is closer to hate than we usually suppose. They are the reverse side and reverse of the same coin of passion.

Happiness is the certainty that our life is not passing uselessly.

After all, life is an adventure. The essential thing is to have courage.

Life is worth living despite all its difficulties, sadness and moments of pain and anguish.

Desiring Great Peace, seeking God. Yup. He existed. He was closer than he looked. Life could not be free. All that suffering, all that brutality, the fierce struggle of every day—these were things that couldn’t help but have a purpose.

Live fast, die fast, eat fast, love fast. It’s as if we wanted to get to a certain point as soon as possible. In the end we will see that there is no serious aim.

Nobody should blame themselves for what they feel, we are not responsible for what our body wants, but for what we did with it.

To escape or to seek. Fugitives sooner or later discover that their problems are geographical in nature.

Will there ever be a place on Earth where a man can at least own his own nose, say what he thinks, have a reasonable share of freedom?

And isn’t the crisis of the modern world mainly the lack of love?

Now, it happens that the majority of our population is accommodative, lazy and gets carried away.

The consumer’s objective is not to own things, but to consume more and more in order to compensate for his inner vacuum, his passivity, his loneliness, his boredom and his anxiety.

We are all a mystery to others. And for ourselves.

Before Mussolini and Stalin there were already stars. And even after they have passed, they will continue to shine.

It is essential that we conquer this world, not with the weapons of hatred and violence, but with those of love and understanding.

How time passes when we wait! Especially when it’s windy. It seems that the wind manages time.

We need to give a human sense to our buildings. And when the love of money, of success, is making us blind, let us know how to pause to look at the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky.

Whoever is hungry is deaf even to the voice of God.

Look at the stars. As long as they shine there will be hope in life.

Each government writes History according to its convenience.

There will never be a lack of a false humanist to invent a philosophical theory in order to reconcile all the monstrosities committed by the “caveman”.

People run away from loneliness when they are afraid of their own thoughts.

Each of us has in his most remote interior caves a sleeping troglodyte who, subjected to a certain type of stimulus, quickly comes to the surface of our being and becomes a totalitarian despot capable of all bestialities.

Nothing is really serious in this country. When someone (…) adopts a final, irremediable solution, everyone loses their minds.

When the winds of change blow, some people erect barriers, others build windmills.

Because I have faith in my career, I need to get rid of the horrible idea that life is simply this unrewarded struggle… this… this misery… this dull ramerrão. I feel like I can accomplish something.

A human being is not just a coin, with reverse and reverse. It is a polyhedron, with thousands of faces. And there are thousands of ways of looking at a person, an act, a fact.

It is still the desire to live that drives us to novels.

The most important thing on the face of the earth is the human person. And surprising man in the act of living is one of the most fantastic things there is.

History cannot be written only in black and white.

I consider myself, first and foremost, a storyteller.

When I speak of conquering this world, I mean the conquest of a decent situation for all human beings, the conquest of dignified peace, the spirit of cooperation.

When I speak of accepting life, I am not referring to the resigned and passive acceptance of all the inequalities, meanness, absurdities and miseries of the world. I am referring, rather, to the acceptance of the necessary struggle, of the suffering that this struggle will bring us, of the bitter hours to which it is bound to take us.