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Valeria Luiselli QUOTES

Valeria Luiselli QUOTES

1 " He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, “I think I’ve become a terrible person. In fact, I’ve become a reptile. Do you know that reptiles are stupid because almost their entire brain capacity is used to feel fear? "

― Valeria Luiselli , The Story of My Teeth

2 " Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth. "

― Valeria Luiselli , The Story of My Teeth

3 " I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

4 " She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

5 " Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

6 " stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics, and signed the contract "

― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

7 " Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

8 " But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces- it's also the first draft of a future face... In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I'll rewrite and understand on a future reading. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Papeles falsos

9 " The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard- instead of numbers, we add up bodies. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Papeles falsos

10 " Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Faces in the Crowd

11 " The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpretor an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

12 " A mi no me afligen esa clase de preocupaciones porque nunca tuve cualidades efímeras. Yo solo tengo de las permanentes
. "

― Valeria Luiselli , The Story of My Teeth

13 " ... caminando por una misma calle que, sospecho, es la superposición de muchas calles. Sé, además, que algunos recuerdos son elaboración posterior: fantasías labradas durante una charla... Recordar, releer: transformar el recuerdo: sutil alquimia que nos concede el don de reinventar nuestros pasado. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Papeles falsos

14 " Because - how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

15 " The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

16 " It’s strange how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

17 " El problema con los criollos, y hasta en mayor grado con las criollas, es que están convencidos de que merecen una mejor vida de la que tienen. La mente criolla está convencida de que bajo la corteza del cráneo porta un diamante que alguien tendría que descubrir, pulir y poner en un cojín rojo, para que los demás se admiren, se pasmen, se den cuenta de lo que siempre se habían perdido. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Faces in the Crowd

18 " Writer and former Border Patrol officer Francisco Cantú has written poignantly about these death maps and all the “clearly marked ghosts” that dot the wide deserts in the southern United States. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

19 " When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

20 " More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare. "

― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive