Eduardo Galeano

“The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.”

“The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength: a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.”

“When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.”

“From their castle in Zurich, the owners of soccer do not propose, they impose. That's their way.”

“I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.”

“The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing.”

“Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.”

“Even though professional soccer has become more about business and less about the game itself, I still believe football is a party for the legs that play it and for the eyes that watch it.”

“Pedro Algorta, a lawyer, showed me the fat dossier about the murder of two women. The double crime had been committed with a knife at the end of 1982, in a Montevideo suburb. The accused, Alma Di Agosto, had confessed. She had been in jail more than a year, and was apparently condemned to rot there for the rest of her life. As is the custom, the police had raped and tortured her. After a month of continuous beatings they had extracted several confessions. Alma Di Agosto's confessions did not much resemble each other, as if she had committed the same murder in many different ways. Different people appeared in each confession, picturesque phantoms without names or addresses, because the electric cattle prod turns anyone into a prolific storyteller. Furthermore, the author demonstrated the agility of an Olympic athlete, the strength of a fairground Amazon, and the dexterity of a professional matador. But the most surprising was the wealth of detail: in each confession, the accused described with millimetric precision clothing, gestures, surroundings, positions, objects..... Alma Di Agosto was blind. Her neighbours, who knew and loved her, were convinced she was guilty: 'Why?' asked the lawyer. 'Because the papers say so.' 'But the papers lie,' said the lawyer. 'But the radio said so too,' explained the neighbours. 'And the TV!”

“Always in all my books I'm trying to reveal or help to reveal the hidden greatness of the small, of the little, of the unknown - and the pettiness of the big.”

“Whoever believes physical size and tests of speed or strength have anything to do with a soccer player's prowess is sorely mistaken. Just as mistaken as those who believe that IQ tests have anything to do with talent or that there is a relationship between penis size and sexual pleasure. Good soccer players need not to be titans sculpted by Michelangelo. In soccer, ability is much more important than shape, and in many cases skill is the art of turning limitations into virtues.”

“And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.”

“I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.”

“It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.”

“I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.”

“History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'”

“The world is becoming an immense military base, and that base is becoming a mental hospital the size of the world. Inside the nuthouse, which ones are crazy?”

“I'm attracted to soccer's capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.”

“I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead, 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle, and I don't give a damn which team or country performs it.”

“My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.”