Top 35 Hernan Diaz Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.”

— Hernan Diaz

2. “Silence between 2 is always shared. But 1 of the 2 owns it and shares it with the other.”

— Hernan Diaz

3. “Fiction harmless? Look at religion. Fiction harmless? Look at the oppressed masses content with their lot because they have embraced the lies imposed on them. History itself is just a fiction – a fiction with an army. And reality? Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget. That’s.”

— Hernan Diaz

4. “A year and an instant are equivalent in a monotonous life.”

— Hernan Diaz

5. “To him, English was still a mudslide of runny, slushy sounds that did not exist in his mother tongue – r, th, sh, and some particularly gelatinous vowels. Frawder thur prueless rare shur per thurst. Mirtler freckling thow. Gold freys yawder far cration. Crewl fry rackler friend thur. No shemling keal rearand for fear under shall an frick. Folger rich shermane furl hearst when pearsh thurlow larshes your morse claws. Clushes ream glown roven thurm shalter shirt.”

— Hernan Diaz

6. “There was a sky. There was a body. And a planet underneath it. And it was all lovely. And it did not matter. He had never been happy before. And it did not matter.”

— Hernan Diaz

7. “They merely stood, completely absorbed by nothing. Time dissolved into the sky. There was little difference between landscape and spectators. Insensible things that existed in one another.”

— Hernan Diaz

8. “My job is about being right. Always. If I’m ever wrong, I must make use of all my means and resources to bend and align reality according to my mistake so that it ceases to be a mistake.”

— Hernan Diaz

9. “And what is choice but a branch of the future grafting itself onto the stem of the present?”

— Hernan Diaz

10. “Nothing more private than pain. It can only involve one. But who? Who is “I” in “I hurt”? The one who inflicts the pain or the one who suffers it? And does “hurt” refer to the inflicting or the suffering?”

— Hernan Diaz

11. “Reality is a fiction with an unlimited budget.”

— Hernan Diaz

12. “Imagine the relief of finding out that one is not the one one thought one was.”

— Hernan Diaz

13. “I find it devastatingly sad that a woman could disappear to this extent, leaving no trace other than a daughter who barely remembers her.”

— Hernan Diaz

14. “I have no country. I don’t want one. The root of all evil, the cause of every war – god and country.”

— Hernan Diaz

15. “Sleeplessness kept claiming her nights, and she used books as shields against the onslaught of her abstract terrors.”

— Hernan Diaz

16. “So if money is fiction, finance capital is the fiction of a fiction. That’s what all those criminals trade in: fictions.”

— Hernan Diaz

17. “And he had learned that pity was insatiable – a false virtue that always craved more suffering to show how limitless and magnificent it could be.”

— Hernan Diaz

18. “Each time we find a way to minimize our effort and increase our gain we are making a business deal, even if it is with ourselves. These negotiations are so ingrained in our routine that they are barely noticeable. But the truth is our existence revolves around profit.”

— Hernan Diaz

19. “The crash, he believed, had been a lancet applied to an abscess. A good bleeding was necessary to do away with the swelling so that the market could find its true bottom and rebuild on solid foundations.”

— Hernan Diaz

20. “Because the worst literature, my father would say, is always written with the best intentions.”

— Hernan Diaz

21. “While grateful for it, he was suspicious of the American notion of freedom, which he viewed as a strict synonym of conformism, or, even worse, the mere possibility of choosing between different versions of the same product.”

— Hernan Diaz

22. “My father disapproved. Secretary was a demeaning occupation, he said. It promised independence but was another knot in the millenary subjection of women to the rule of men.”

— Hernan Diaz

23. “One way or the other, she had no doubt she would succeed in influencing her husband and obtaining the independence she so longed for.”

— Hernan Diaz

24. “Such was the extent of his power. His fortune bent reality around it. This reality included people – and their perception of the world, like mine, was also caught in the gravitational pull of Bevel’s wealth and warped by it.”

— Hernan Diaz

25. “Every single one of our acts is ruled by the laws of economy.”

— Hernan Diaz

26. “A vicious circle has taken hold of our able-bodied men: they increasingly rely on the government to alleviate the misery created by that same government, not realizing that this dependency only perpetuates their sorry state of affairs.”

— Hernan Diaz

27. “Are you saying, perhaps, that I am moved by spite, revenge or, even worse, that I am seeking some sort of perverse thrill in cruelty? It seems to me that you don’t understand what our work here is about.”

— Hernan Diaz

28. “She found it baffling and inexcusable that the medical sciences, which had made so much progress in every field, should lag in such a neglectful way when it came to mental disorders.”

— Hernan Diaz

29. “The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited.”

— Hernan Diaz

30. “It is hard work to give money away. It requires a great deal of planning and strategizing. If not managed properly, philanthropy can both harm the giver and spoil the receiver. Expand. Generosity is the mother of ingratitude.”

— Hernan Diaz

31. “During their lessons, Lorimer often reminded his student that his remarkable talent with the scalpel would amount to nothing if the knife was not held by a loving hand guided by a truth-seeking eye. The study of nature is a barren enterprise if stones, plants, and animals become frozen under the magnifying glass, Lorimer said. A naturalist should look at the world with warm affection, if not ardent love.”

— Hernan Diaz

32. “Intimacy can be an unbearable burden for those who, first experiencing it after a lifetime of proud self-sufficiency, suddenly realize it makes their world complete. Finding bliss becomes one with the fear of losing it.”

— Hernan Diaz

33. “There is a better world,” a man said. “But it’s more expensive.”

— Hernan Diaz

34. “This, she told herself, was the beginning of madness. The mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth.”

— Hernan Diaz

35. “I have had countless men repeat my ideas back to me as if they were theirs – as if I would not remember having come up with those thoughts in the first place.”

— Hernan Diaz

36. “Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress.”

— Hernan Diaz