“This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.”

“Captain John Sommers joined his brother and sister in the library, "Do you remember Jacob Todd?-The cad who defrauded us with that yarn about missions in Tierra del Fuego? asked Jeremy Sommers.-The same... He changed his name. Now he calls himself Jacob Freemont, and he's a newspaperman in San Francisco.-Egad! So it is true that in the United States any scoundrel may begin a new life?-Jacob Todd paid for his offense several times over. I think it is splendid that there is a country where a man can have a second chance.”

“Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death. ”

“She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate”

“Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.”

“People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: "There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.”

“I try desperately to conquer the transitory nature of my existence, to trap moments before they evenesce, to untangle the confusion of my past. Every instant disappears in a breath and immediately becomes the past; reality is ephemeral and changing, pure longing.”