In the Night of Time Quotes

“He's always been about to leave. He doesn't know for how many years he's been a guest in his own life.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He's always been about to leave. He doesn't know for how many years he's been a guest in his own life.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“Only with her had he discovered and now regained what he'd never known could be so pleasurable, the habit of conversing, explaining himself to himself, confirming immediate affinities in what until then he'd though of as a solitary sensations and thoughts. Always his fear of inconveniency, his slowness in finding the exact words and the courage to say them, always the temptation of silence and conformity, the permanent frustration of feeling like a guest in his own house and in a life that was the only one he had and yet never belonged to him.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“I've thought a great deal about the things I'd say to you, if I saw you again, but now I don't like having said any of it. We talk and words betray us. You think of them and when you say them out loud they mean something else.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He had so little experience, or so little capacity for real introspection, he didn't imagine the guilt and anguish lying in wait; he didn't even ask himself what Judith Biely might be feeling. She didn't exist for him in an autonomous, complete way but only as a projection of his own desire”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“El alma de las personas no está en las fotografías sino en las cosas menudas que tocaron, las que tuvieron el calor de las palmas de sus manos.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He too was tortured by impatience to conclude as soon as possible the impersonation of family life at dinner; he too lived perturbed by desires he didn't know how and didn't want to control, dazzled by expectations that were never satiated and never fulfilled, incapable of appreciating or even seeing what he had before him, restless to have the present end as soon as possible and the future arrive, whatever it might be, any of the futures he'd been pursuing like successive mirages throughout his life, without age or experience or the habit of disappointment dulling his longing or chipping its cutting edge.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“I think there are many more despicable people than I ever imagined.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He is summoned not by her desire but by the fact of her existence.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“Observed by others, he was afraid they might discover his inner lack of substance, detect his discomfort behind his smile or the fear that had gradually become his natural state.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“Only Judith's presence expanded his capacity for seeing, opened his eyes to things he wouldn't have noticed without her.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“...Ignacio Abel feels a weariness he doesn't remember having experienced before, all the more evident in the presence of someone younger (but he didn't feel the age difference when he was with Judith; how strange to have lived so long in a state of total unawareness, to have thought himself immune to the years, to weakness, to death)”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He continued to wait as if the force of his obstinacy would influence Judith's actions and will.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He wasn't asking for a lasting future without distress, only a moment to look at her, hear her voice.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“...because her sharp intelligence allowed her to understand the extent of what she hadn't learned.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“Every lover attempts to keep a genealogy of his love, afraid treasured memories will inevitably fade away.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“The appearance of normality was in and of itself a poor antidote to disaster.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“What had excited most about her from the start was what made him most afraid and what had eventually taken her away from him: the strength of her will.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“...she decided to break things off (...) with a determination that left no room for ambiguity or remorse, and perhaps had also made her immune to pain.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He'd been one of those daytime men for whom night falls earlier and earlier in their lives.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“She looked around and wouldn't understand how she'd reached this point, by what sum of errors, as if after a long, difficult journey she found herself in the wrong station, her suitcases on the ground, the train she'd been on disappearing in the distance and no other in sight, and nobody in the station, not even an open clerk's window where she could consult timetables or buy another ticket.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spite of the passage of years, he'd never stopped being a stranger, an intruder.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“He'd forgotten the sensation of novely, the thrill of desiring a woman so intensely it was pure magnetism of her female presence that made him tremble, more than her physical beauty or the slightly exotic elegance of her dress or the spontaneity with which she had leaned on his arm, holding it tighter when a speeding care passed close to them”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“But he didn't have to invoke her, she was a constant, secret presence in his memory”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“I knew very well I couldn't give you many things you desired, but then neither will any other woman because what you want doesn't exist and you don't know how to want what's closest to you.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“After so much time he was still searching as he had then, hoping for something he couldn't name but that corroded or undermined his stability of thought, not allowing him real rest, injecting doubt and suspicion into the evident satisfaction or everything he'd achieved”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“The attraction of an exotic presence that was intensely carnal and at the same time as intangible as a promise was contained not in her attitude or words but in her very presence, the shape of her face, the color of her hair and eyes, the timbre of her voice, and something else not in her, the promise of so many unfulfilled and often unformed desires in him, roused by her proximity as if by a clap of hands or a voice revealing the dimension of a great area of darkness.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time

“...it disconcerts him not to be immune to the weakness that he finds so unpleasant in others.”
― Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time