Olga's Reviews > Don Quixote

I am going to miss the ingenious hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha and and his witty squire Sancho Panza. Reading about their adventures has been a therapy to me for almost two months. I am sorry, it is over.
It is a great novel about the most important things in life - freedom, loyalty, kindness (and cruelty), friendship, insanity and common sense. It is a story about the courage to be an odd duck and often a laughing stock (some might call that insanity). But, above all, it is a story about having faith and then losing it. And losing faith means mental or physical death.
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'When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!'
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'So it isn’t the masses who are to blame for demanding rubbish, but rather those who aren’t capable of providing them with anything else.'
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'I think and believe that I’m enchanted, and this satisfies my conscience, for it would weigh heavily upon me, if I believed I wasn’t enchanted and had let myself be locked up in this crate like a lazy coward'
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'It’s up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they’re going well … For I’ve heard that what they call fortune is a flighty woman who drinks too much, and, what’s more, she’s blind, so she can’t see what she’s doing, and she doesn’t know who she’s knocking over or who she’s raising up.'
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'... truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future'
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'Laughter distances us from that which is ugly and therefore potentially distressing, and indeed enables us to obtain paradoxical pleasure and therapeutic benefit from it.'