63 Quotes by Valeria Luiselli

Los niños obligan a los padres a buscar un pulso específico, una mirada, un ritmo, la manera correcta de contar una historia, a sabiendas de que las historias no arreglan nada ni salvan a nadie, pero quizás hacen del mundo un lugar más complejo y a la vez más tolerable. Y a veces, sólo a veces, más hermoso. Las historias son un modo de sustraer el futuro del pasado, la única forma de encontrar la claridad en retrospectiva.

Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don't know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it's just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.

Then, after working together for just a few months, we fell in love — completely, irrationally, predictably, and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird, not knowing who the rock was and who the bird — and when summer arrived, we decided to move in together.

The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather - more a whimper than a bang.

All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, re-enacted, reinterpreted, the world, it’s fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it wound its way around a sun, and in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.

Everyone says they're empty. Everyone says – vast and flat. Everyone – mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere – indomitable. But no one had ever told use about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes.

But as I tucked the picture back in between some pages toward the end of the book, I realized something important, which is this: that everything that happened after I took the picture was also inside it, even though no one could see it, except me when I looked at it, and maybe also you, in the future, when you look at it, even if you didn't even see the original moment with your own eyes.

Genetics is a science full of gods, Mr. Sanchez.

I... stopped acting as if I was privileged enough to worry about corporate ethics.