Faces in the Crowd Quotes

“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, Los ingrávidos

“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, Los ingrávidos

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

“Por supuesto hay muchas muertes a lo largo de una vida. La mayoría de las personas no se dan cuenta. Creen que se mueren una vez y ya. Pero basta con poner un poco de atención para darse cuenta de que uno va y se muere a cada rato. No es un modo poético de hablar. No estoy diciendo que el alma esto y el alma aquello, sino que un día uno cruza una calle y lo arrolla un carro; otro día se queda dormido en la tina y hasta ahí quedó y otro, rueda por las escaleras de su edificio y se parte la cabeza. La mayoría de las muertes no importan: la película sigue corriendo. Nomás que ahí es cuando todo da un giro, aunque sea imperceptible y los resultados no sean siempre inmediatos,”
― Valeria Luiselli, Los ingrávidos

“But he never got the joke, perhaps because prophetic jokes aren't funny.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“Dios y la gente se solidarizan con las víctimas. Pero no con cualquier víctima, sino con las víctimas que se victimizan con éxito. Mi ex mujer, por ejemplo. Cuando nos divorciamos, la criolla se volvió poeta y víctima; la profeta de las víctimas divorciadas. Ella acaba de publicar un librito de poemas en prosa muy rencorosos, autogestionados y trilingües, en la editorial imaginaria de su mentora, una poeta gringa que dirige un taller de poesía que se llama Hijas Espirituales de Mina Loy (SDML, por sus siglas en inglés). Tiene la descortesía de invitarme a la presentación, que se celebra en su propio departamento. Como sé que le tengo que caer bien porque si no, no me presta a los niños nunca, tengo la cortesía de ir hasta Nueva York a verla.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Los ingrávidos

“El problema con los criollos, y hasta en mayor grado con las criollas, es que están convencidos de que merecen una mejor vida de la que tienen. La mente criolla está convencida de que bajo la corteza del cráneo porta un diamante que alguien tendría que descubrir, pulir y poner en un cojín rojo, para que los demás se admiren, se pasmen, se den cuenta de lo que siempre se habían perdido.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Los ingrávidos

“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, Los ingrávidos

“I decide to name the three cats who have taken residence in my apartment. They are called Cantos, Paterson and That. Naturally, I never know which is which, so I sometimes just call out : "That Paterson cantos !" And the three of them appear.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“I knew it wasn’t a good idea to place the least trust in household objects; 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.All that has survived from that period are the echoes of certain conversations, a handful of recurrent ideas, poems I liked and read over and over until I knew them by heart. Everything else is a later elaboration. It’s not possible for my memories of that life to have more substance. They are scaffolding, structures, empty houses.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“If I believed in turning points, which I don’t, I’d say that I began that night to live as if inhabited by another possible life that wasn’t mine, but one which, simply by the use of imagination, I could give myself up to completely. I started looking inward from the outside, from someplace to nowhere.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“Note: Owen was born in El Rosario, Sinaloa. But that’s not important. He was born on February 4, 1904. Or perhaps May 13.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“Dejar una vida. Dinamitar todo. No, no todo: dinamitar el metro cuadrado que uno ocupaba entre la gente. Más bien: dejar sillas vacías en las mesas que se compartían con las amistades, no a modo de metáfora, sino en verdad, dejar una silla, volverse un hueco para los amigos, permitir que el círculo de silencio en torno a uno se ensanche y se llene de especulaciones. Lo que pocos entienden es que uno deja una vida para empezar otra.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“The boy wakes me up: do you know where mosquitoes come from, Mama?”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“But death in Philadelphia is approaching like a bedraggled cat. it rubs it's dirty ass up against my lower leg, licks my hands, scratches my face, ask me for food and I feed it.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd

“Baldy fell for Dakota. She fell for his bathtub. They began a torturous, dangerous, multilateral relationship.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Los ingrávidos

“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, Los ingrávidos

“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, Los ingrávidos