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The Adventures of China Iron QUOTES

The Adventures of China Iron QUOTES

1 " Ella era mi polo y yo la aguja imantada de la brújula: todo mi cuerpo se estiraba hacia ella, se empequeñecía de ganas concentradas. Fue bajo el imperio de esa fuerza que empecé a sentir y hoy creo que es posible que siempre sea así, que se sienta al mundo en relación con otros, con el lazo con otros. Me sentía viva y feroz como una manada de depredadores y amorosa como Estreya, que festeja cada mañana y cada reencuentro como si lo sorprendieran, como si supiera que podrían no haber sucedido, sabe, mi perrito, que el azar y la muerte son más feroces que la pólvora y que podían irrumpir como irrumpen las tormentas. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

2 " Los pastizales se bamboleaban con el viento cuando salimos y parecía la pampa un mar de dos colores: cuando se dejaban vencer los tallos, era blanca y destellaba como espuma; cuando volvían a su posición inicial, era verde y fulguraban los distintos tonos de los pastos, que parecían brotes tiernos aunque ya casi nada brotaba. Más bien volvía todo a la tierra haciéndose marrón, iba del verde claro, el amarillo, el oro y el ocre a la caída. Otra vez respirábamos, como si hubiéramos salido de una cueva, como si el aire de la estancia hubiera sido turbio, pesado [...]. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

3 " The smell of near-black tea leaves torn from the green mountains of India that would travel to Britain without losing their moisture, and without losing the sharp perfume born of the tears Buddha shed for the world's suffering, suffering that also travels in tea: we drink green mountains and rain, and we also drink what the Queen drinks. We drink the Queen, we drink work, and we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them. Thanks to steam power, we no longer drink the lash of the whip on the oarsmen's backs. But we do drink choking coal miners. And that's the way of the world: everything alive lives off the death of someone or something else. Because nothing comes from nothing. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

4 " We were nearly in the wetlands where water doubles happiness just as it doubles every image reflected in it, filling each one with plural lives. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

5 " Poverty yields cracked skin. It carves and slowly scrapes away at its young, and leaves them to fend for themselves in all weathers. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

6 " Munidas de transparencia llegaríamos a la toldería: llevábamos caña, espejos —los reflejos son de lo diáfano— y la prenda mayor, el diamante "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

7 " But the dragon aroused such passion in me, that beautiful beast made from horrible beasts: the eyes of a locust, the horns of a zebu, the snout of an ox, the nose of a dog, the whiskers of a catfish, the shaggy mane of a ñandú, the tail of a viper, the scales of a fish, the claws of a gigantic chimango, and with potent phlegm made of fire. The dragon was an animal that I liked to imagine flying above our heads and over our roof like a guardian angel: why shouldn’t a wagon be a house protected by a dragon? "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

8 " It was also a rite of passage, the ditch was almost a branding iron, something to mark the man; from then on a new life had begun. He made them dig a grave for their pasts, a frontier, a before and after. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

9 " He never appreciated what I did for him by taking some of his songs and putting them in my book. I took his voice, the voice of the voiceless, do you see, to the whole country... "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

10 " I wish you could see us; but no one will. We know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colours, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a spectre: their outline turns blurry and insubstantial, the colours fade, and everything melts into the white cloud. And so we go. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

11 " Before the storm, what hung in the air, and even the air itself, seemed to be the long inhalation of the bellows of a machine priming itself for an explosion, or the stampede of a herd of captive beasts. Invariably after the stillness a commotion would begin. Everything yielded to the violence of the wind that took advantage of the sudden darkness to lash the world, a world barely visible in the metallic flashes that struck everything that stood upright, drawing a new line from the lines in the sky down to the earth: a line making everything crack, split and fly off in fury, as if reluctantly snatched from stillness. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

12 " It was the first journey; I knew full well that all journeys come to an end, and maybe this experience of time as finite is what lends light and texture to every living moment, knowing that you have to go back home, that you’re in a foreign land. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

13 " Home always seems fixed to the ground, even when home is a boat. Or a wagon. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

14 " It was like we were secreting fine threads to make a shell or carapace, woven together like a kind of house made not from spider’s silk, straw, mud or the leathery shell of a crab, but gradually formed from the loops of words and gestures. From Liz’s story and my care for each of our possessions, a space was emerging. One that was ours, with the wagon which went steadily forward, with that empty land which was becoming as flat as it seems to those who have known hills and mountains. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

15 " Day was dawning, light was filtering through the clouds, a soft rain fell, and when the oxen lumbered off, there was a moment that was pale and golden, and tiny droplets of rain sparkled in the breeze, and the grassland was greener than ever. Then it began to pour and everything shone, even the dark grey of the clouds; it was the beginning of another life. It was a radiant omen. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

16 " And in each fragment of that river that was devouring its own banks, a bit of sky was reflected. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

17 " It's difficult to know what you remember, is it what actually happened? Or is it the story that you've told and re-told and polished like a gemstone over the course of years, like something that has lustre but is as lifeless as a stone? "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

18 " The first price we had to pay for such happiness was the dust. I, having lived wholly inside the dust, having been little more than one of the many forms that dust took there, having been contained in the atmosphere - the earth of the pampa is also sky - started to feel it, to notice it, to hate it when it made my teeth gritty, when it stuck to my sweat, when it weighed down my hat. We declared war on the dust, all the while knowing that we were fighting a losing battle: we come from dust. "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron

19 " liberado "

― Gabriela Cabezón Cámara , The Adventures of China Iron