"We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine"
About this Quote
Mortality is the default setting; Galeano is interested in the brief hacks that make us forget it. By pairing "the first kiss" with "the second glass of wine", he sketches two small thresholds where consciousness tips into something else: intimacy, then looseness; connection, then abandon. It’s not grand romance or epic drunkenness. It’s first and second - the moments where life stops being merely managed and starts being felt.
The line works because it treats transcendence as both tender and faintly suspect. A first kiss is a secular sacrament: it reorders time, turns a body into a universe. The second glass of wine is the sly counterweight, implying that what feels like eternity is also chemistry, ritual, and social permission. Not the first glass - the polite one - but the second, when performance slips and the room warms. Galeano’s subtext: we don’t escape death by thinking harder; we do it by stepping, briefly, outside ourselves.
Context matters. As a journalist and chronicler of Latin America’s wounds and wonders, Galeano wrote against numbness: against living as if history, violence, and inequality were just weather. Here, he’s offering a micro-politics of aliveness. Pleasure isn’t frivolous; it’s resistance to despair and a reminder that the body can still be a site of truth. The irony is gentle but real: we remain mortal, of course. The kiss and the wine don’t cancel death - they interrupt its monopoly on our attention.
The line works because it treats transcendence as both tender and faintly suspect. A first kiss is a secular sacrament: it reorders time, turns a body into a universe. The second glass of wine is the sly counterweight, implying that what feels like eternity is also chemistry, ritual, and social permission. Not the first glass - the polite one - but the second, when performance slips and the room warms. Galeano’s subtext: we don’t escape death by thinking harder; we do it by stepping, briefly, outside ourselves.
Context matters. As a journalist and chronicler of Latin America’s wounds and wonders, Galeano wrote against numbness: against living as if history, violence, and inequality were just weather. Here, he’s offering a micro-politics of aliveness. Pleasure isn’t frivolous; it’s resistance to despair and a reminder that the body can still be a site of truth. The irony is gentle but real: we remain mortal, of course. The kiss and the wine don’t cancel death - they interrupt its monopoly on our attention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
|---|---|
| Source | Evidence: “Ella no iba a terminarse nunca, y nosotros tampoco, porque somos todos mortales hasta el primer beso y el segundo vaso, y eso lo sabe cualquiera, por poco que sepa.” (Chapter/section: "La fiesta" (page number varies by edition/translation)). The widely-circulated English line (“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine”) appears to be an English rendering of the Spanish sentence above, from the short piece "La fiesta" inside Galeano’s 1989 book "El libro de los abrazos". Multiple non-primary websites attribute it to that book, and several reproduce the surrounding Spanish passage, but I did not locate a fully viewable, publisher-scanned page image with stable pagination. The archival record from Universidad de la República (Archivo Galeano‑Villagra) confirms the primary work exists as a 1989 Siglo XXI publication and provides an ISBN-10 for that edition (950-9374-27-X). Other candidates (1) Simon Grave and the Wrath of Grapes (Len Boswell, 2023) compilation95.0% ... feeling and began to be happy and to make plans . " -Ernest Hemingway , A Moveable Feast " We are all mortal unti... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Galeano, Eduardo. (2026, February 13). We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-all-mortal-until-the-first-kiss-and-the-145404/
Chicago Style
Galeano, Eduardo. "We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine." FixQuotes. February 13, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-all-mortal-until-the-first-kiss-and-the-145404/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine." FixQuotes, 13 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-are-all-mortal-until-the-first-kiss-and-the-145404/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.
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