I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn’t know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn’t see how I could write it.

Why do people talk of the horrors of old age? It’s great. I feel like a fine old car with the parts gradually wearing out, but I’m not complaining, … Those who find growing old...

Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough...

Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it

There were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on.

I see mysteries and complications wherever I look, and I have never met a steadily logical person.

I daresay I was the worst bed partner in five continents.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.

The thing about war is that it has two sides, … The first is the absolute horror of it. The other thing about it is you meet absolutely marvelous people … brave and extraordinary people.

I didn’t write. I just wandered about.

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

In the last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they...

And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish.

I followed the war wherever I could reach it.

In Warsaw, you also remember that you are in a Communist-controlled country, though by all accounts the control is now humane and lenient, judged by what it was and what it is in other satellite...

But now that the guerrilla fighting is over, the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did.

I found out about the Spanish war because I was in Germany when it began.

What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain.

From two o’clock one afternoon until the ship docked in England again the next evening at seven, none of the medical personnel stopped work.

I only knew about daily life. It was said, well, it isn’t everybody’s daily life. That is why I started.

A broken heart is such a shabby thing, like poverty and failure and the incurable diseases which are also deforming. I hate it and am ashamed of it, and I must somehow repair this heart...

Furthermore, they were constantly informed by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world: they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.

If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it… seemed a defeat.

I tell you loneliness is the thing to master. Courage and fear, love, death are only parts of it and can easily be ruled afterwards. If I make myself master my own loneliness there will...

Germans trained in obedience and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are they reliable partners for anyone else.

It is alleged that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France after the Franco victory.

Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.

People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that...

The French Forces of the Interior, who have scarcely enough to help themselves, try to help their wounded Spanish comrades in arms.

Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business....

I used to write letters to the wounded in the Palace Hotel, and I used to drive a station wagon with blood in bottles to a battalion aid station.

The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith;...