63 Quotes by Valeria Luiselli

I’ve always thought that hell is the people you could one day become. The most frightening ones.

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.

There’s nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects.

For victims of some crimes, real and horrible crimes, permission to stay in American territory is probably insufficient recompense. But it’s better than nothing. It’s certainly better than the right to a mass grave in Tamaulipas or Veracruz, for instance – the most common “permanent residence” granted to Central American migrants who travel across Mexico.

But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces- it’s also the first draft of a future face... In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future reading.

When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere – in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.

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.

Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.

The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.