Luiselli Valeria Quotes & Sayings

Why Banning Miller, what a vision you are in your fine dress. Must've taken a dozen slaves a dozen days to get you into that getup. 'Course, your daddy tells me it takes the space of a schoolboy's wink to get you out of it again. — Jane Espenson

That's the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It's all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity. — Valeria Luiselli

Because - how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that. — Valeria Luiselli

Perhaps it's right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable. — Valeria Luiselli

Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you'll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery. — Valeria Luiselli

Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut. — Valeria Luiselli

There couldn't be anything more perfect, she thought, than slow dancing, barefoot, on a balcony in New Orleans, while the rain poured down and twilight wrapped around them — Linda Howard

Sportsmanship is making sure you have respect for the guy you're playing across from. — Warren Moon

Harry, Ron and Hermione looked at each other. They had never seen eye to eye with Hagrid about what he called 'interesting creatures' and other people called 'terrifying monsters'. On the other hand, there didn't seem to be any particular harm in Buckbeak. In fact, by Hagrid's usual standards, he was positively — J.K. Rowling

I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. — Valeria Luiselli

The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or - even worse - might be a tourist. — Valeria Luiselli

But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave. — Valeria Luiselli

So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers. — W.E.B. Du Bois

When a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes. — Valeria Luiselli

I'd come out to Los Angeles for a vacation to see a friend and just fell in love with it. — Claire Forlani

In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe. — Valeria Luiselli

The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny. — Valeria Luiselli

I won't say I wouldn't be grateful and happy and delighted and thrilled to bits to receive a nomination. But I wouldn't be suicidal if it didn't happen. — Tom Wilkinson

When I've done gymnastics, ballet or soccer - I was always trying to be the best. I'm really driven. Really driven. — Chloe Grace Moretz

I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I'd been elaborating for years. — Valeria Luiselli

All those different names, dates, deaths, each backed with a past life, were like shrubs in an arboretum, spaced out equidistantly as far as the eye could
see. No gently swaying breezes for them, no fragrances, no touch of a hand reaching through the darkness. They who seemed like trees lost to time. They to whom no thoughts occurred, nor would ever have words to get them across. They'd left all that to those who still had some living to do. — Haruki Murakami

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow. — Valeria Luiselli

as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing. — Valeria Luiselli

Maybe if he was the sort of man who could eat someone else's hash browns, who the hotel wanted to impress so much they sent him someone else's breakfast, maybe then he was the sort of man who could get an audience with the King. — Dave Eggers

My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story. — Valeria Luiselli

However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it. — Valeria Luiselli

Stupid Crusaders with their stupid rules. For a homicidal group, they're appallingly restrictive.
No, Meda, you can't leave campus.
No, Meda, you know we have a curfew.
No, Meda, you can't eat that guy. — Eliza Crewe

There's nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects. — Valeria Luiselli

Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything. — Valeria Luiselli

Before the immigration crisis was declared in the summer of 2014, minors seeking immigration relief were given approximately twelve months to find a lawyer to represent their case before their first court hearing. But when the crisis was declared and Obama's administration created the priority juvenile docket, that window was reduced to twenty-one days. In real and practical terms, what the creation of that priority docket meant was that the cases involving unaccompanied minors from Central America were grouped together and moved to the top of the list of pending cases in immigration court. Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing - at least from the point of view of the children involved. Basically, the priority juvenile docket implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94 percent, and that both they and the organizations that normally provided legal representation now had much less time to build a defense. — Valeria Luiselli

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

I've always thought that hell is the people you could one day become. The most frightening ones. — Valeria Luiselli

Truth makes on the ocean of nature no one track of light; every eye, looking on, finds its own. — Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

I go down the street, I say hello to everybody, a stranger or otherwise. I know that they do not know me, but I like to say hello and I think they appreciate it. I notice their faces light up with a smile and I believe that if all the people in our great city ... would do that, the whole world would begin to say it is the "Friendly City." You can do a tremendous thing here. We get so absorbed, we do not always speak to our friends. Speak to them, even strangers, you are not going to give offense. — Spencer W. Kimball

But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now. — Haruki Murakami

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. — Willa Cather