40 Quotes by Carolina De Robertis

If you don't script your own way once and for all, your story will be written by someone else, and your actions will be guided by other people's dreams of who you should be rather than by the bright jagged thing you really are.

What makes the self?Experiences. Acculturation.What else?I don't know.What's within you.She says, I don't know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived.You can never know that.No.But there is a you that was there before you were born and that nobody shaped or changed or could have changed.

Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away.

Nunca podré ser la misma mujer que fui o que podría haber sido, y si debo vivir, entonces debo matarla, ahora, aquí, sentada en este suelo, debo matar a la mujer que podría haber sido y no puedo ser. Porque hay otra mujer esperando que todavía puedo ser pero que aun no soy, solo estoy empezando a ser ella

I wondered whether I had gone insane. If so, I thought, then this is what it feels like; I would never have guessed the world would still appear so sharp and vivid, the streets the same, the clouds the same, nothing different except your mind has come unhinged, its cogs whirling loose and wild and hazardous.

But in the morning I would always rise and polish the surface of myself, a gleaming, confident young woman, an excellent student and good daughter starting her fourth year at the university, moving smoothly through the world, and even though inside the chaos scraped and railed I would push it into the crevices of the day so it could not be detected.

there was music . . . after church and food, like the third point in a holy trinity

Le tango est à nous. Rappelle-toi ça, rappelle-toi d'où il vient. Pour chaque personne qui connaît ses racines, il y en a cent qui ne les connaissent pas. Et peut-être qu'un jour ceux qui savent auront tous disparu. Mais le secret vivra toujours, son coeur bat dans les percussions et dans son rythme syncopé.

habaneras, sparked by sailors freshly arrived from Cuba who . . . drummed their blood-quickening beats with their knuckles on every surface they could find