11 Quotes by Andrés Neuman

Farewells are so strange. There’s something terrifying, deadly, about them, and yet they awaken a desperate urge to live. Perhaps farewells create new territories, or they send us back to the only territory that truly belongs to us, that of solitude. It is as though we needed to go back there from time to time, to draw a line and say: I came from here, this was me, what sort of person am I?

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.

Some men are brilliant talkers, I've met many like that. But almost none of them know when to be silent. Most of my female friends confuse the tough guys with the silent types. I think that's a movie myth. The worst examples of male aggression I've come across have been intolerably verbal.

... it's a bad sign when someone drinks a lot and doesn't laugh.

..when questioned about their favorite techniques or their best loved authors, writers will talk incessantly, in the same way the sick become particularly garrulous when we inquire after their ailments; the difference being that writers can't help talking about something that saves them, whereas the sick can't help talking about the thing that is dragging them under.

I wonder whether, perhaps without realizing it, we seek out the books we need to read. Or whether books themselves, which are intelligent entities, detect their readers and catch their eye. In the end, every book is the I Ching. You pick it up, open it, and there it is, there you are.

I'm afraid there are two kinds of alienation: one is the exploited worker's, the other that of the worker on holiday. The first has no time to think. The second can only think, and that is his sentence.

Perhaps farewells create new territories, or they send us back to the only territory that truly belongs to us, that of solitude.

History shows that people are as changeable as rivers.