63 Quotes by Valeria Luiselli

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.

Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don't fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.

New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time.

The belief that the migration of all of those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution.

Why is it that looking through someone's things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of their person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?

Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.

Todo este país, dijo papá, es un enorme cementerio, pero sólo a algunas personas les tocan tumbas como dios manda, porque la mayoría de las vidas no importan. La mayoría de las vidas son borradas, se pierden en el torbellino de basura que llamamos historia, dijo.

He spoke slowly, as if searching for adjectives in the darkness.

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