Ernesto Guevara de la Serna Quotes in The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

Miner's Wife: Are you two looking for work?

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: No, we aren't looking for work.

Miner's Wife: No?... Then why are you traveling?

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: We travel just to travel.

Miner's Wife: Bless you... Blessed be your travels.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew?

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Wandering around our America has changed me more than I thought. I am not me any more. At least I'm not the same me I was.

Leper from San Pablo: Why did you want to be a doctor?

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: I wanted to be useful, somehow.

Leper from San Pablo: You're wasting your time.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Why?

Leper from San Pablo: Life is pain.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: You gotta fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: This isn't a tale of heroic feats. It's about two lives running parallel for a while, with common aspirations and similar dreams.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Me, I'm not the same me, at least not the same spiritual me.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: What we had in common - our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Are you talking to the motorcycle again?

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Even though we are too insignificant to be spokesmen for such a noble cause, we believe, and this journey has only confirmed this belief, that the division of American into unstable and illusory nations is a complete fiction. We are one single mestizo race from Mexico to the Magellan Straits. And so, in an attempt to free ourselves from narrow minded provincialism, I propose a toast to Peru and to a united America.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Mother.

Mother Sister Alberto: Yes?

Alberto Granado: We want to eat.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: We deserve to eat like everyone else.

Mother Sister Alberto: Yes, but you didn't go to mass.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: No.

Mother Sister Alberto: Then, how do you expect to feed the body if you didn't feed the soul first?

Alberto Granado: Er, denying food is not very Christian-like.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: Yes, I doubt Jesus would act like this.

Mother Sister Alberto: In this house, we have a set of rules that have to be followed.

Ernesto Guevara de la Serna: [to Alberto now, as she turns away] I haven't read any rule book.

Alberto Granado: Neither did I. I think that if I find it I would eat it.