The Mad Patagonian Quotes

“Bert gave a long low whistle, like a bullet that could bend around corners.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“Luis, who knew the language of tears better than most men, was immobilized by the crystalline purity of the girl’s sad story even more than by her radiant, vulnerable beauty. She wept as we will all weep when the world splits in two and the end has
finally arrived. Because love is the saddest thing when it goes away. Because love is unfathomable when one is wounded so deeply. Because in such moments love does not even truly exist.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“If he surrendered the advantage of the gun he would find himself floating in the gutters of an inhuman world, a part of the daily flotsam and jetsam of a hundred thousand abortions whooshing down the wormhole drain, drowning in a sea of pus-streaked semen and warm piss and menstrual juice and dead fetuses and radiator fluid and bloody diarrhea, seeking refuge inside the cathedral ruins of an embryonic sac, curling up to say his prayers then whispering goodnight, God speed, good riddance, gadzooks, the sac shrinking, disappearing into the frigid, humpbacked void of sodomized angels, wingless now, lecherous gargoyles sporting skeletal appendages without feathers, it would be a birth in reverse, the collapse of the universal soul. He wasn't sure how to save himself.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“Then the bells of the Cathedral began to ring, a slow, steady, comforting sound, and she found herself thinking back to that moment when the dream of the tiny white bird began to merge with the dream of her life and how very unaware she had been, it had been hidden from her view, this beginning, as so many things are when we are young.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“Love, she decided, was walking along the Malecón on a summer evening, looking out at the dark blue waters of the Straits of Florida without a care in the world, the glorious knot of humanity flowing past, the faces of happy couples glowing brightly with the pink-glowing evening sky, nobody saying a single word, a family up ahead buying ice cream from an ice-cream vendor, and then the light softening, dissolving, fading into nothingness.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“We became a trinity as holy in our own minds
as the Blessed Trinity the priests always talked about but which we could never see.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“Truly, the road to everlasting grief is a swift descent.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian

“It is a feeling of being self-contained, existing only within the boundaries of oneself, impaled by the horn of my own thoughts, my memories bleeding out, but slowly, the moment stretching to infinity, the clocks of the world now useless, like deflated balloons that have spun around aimlessly for a while and then, sputtering, float lazily to the ground, their mechanical parts now draped over rocks and seashells, this is what death is.”
― Javier Pedro Zabala, The Mad Patagonian