Telex from Cuba Quotes

“Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. You had to choose one or the other was Everly’s feeling. Try to shape a moment into a memory you could save and look at later, or have the moment as it was happening, but you couldn’t have both.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“She believed that people are born every minute of their lives, and what they are in each of those minutes is what they are completely.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“I was a kid. I didn't know about love, that you see someone and whether or not they say much, they make the world suddenly different, a mysterious and more alive place that you can access only through them. And the new, better world falls lifeless and flat when they go away.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“Figs plopped on the hood like soft leather pouches.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“[S]ympathy for people, without any sympathy for what caused their circumstances, [is] not real sympathy but sentimentality.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“By caring just that much less than whatever you ante as indifference.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“She always had that empty look. ... It's a particular blankness, and I've mostly seen it on billboards for so-called gentlemen's clubs. The convincing ones have that same empty look. Like they know just how to void themselves and not get in the way of some "gentleman's" fantasy.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba

“La Mazière had met with El Extraño at a chicken-dinner-and-cockfight joint near the Havana airport, a place that proved even more vulgar than the concept had sounded.”
― Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba