Quote by Carlos Fuentes: “History has no beginning or end. Every moment in time is the beginning and end of history.”

History is not a line with a start and a finish. Every moment contains everything that led to it and determines everything that follows. This means the present is always both consequence and cause — which makes what we do now carry enormous weight.

Fuentes was deeply engaged in debates around 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. Latin American intellectuals were contesting official European celebrations of 'discovery' and insisting on the colonial violence the anniversary obscured. His writing that year interrogated the relationship between historical narrative and political power.

Mexican novelist and diplomat, one of the central figures of the Latin American Boom, whose novels The Death of Artemio Cruz and Terra Nostra engage Mexico's colonial history, political corruption, and cultural complexity. He received the Cervantes Prize in 1987.