Who Is Vera Kelly? Quotes

“He bought me a fernet and did not, to my relief, try to explain to me what it was. Expat men had a mania for explaining the indigenous liquors.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“On a Tuesday I came home from school to an empty house, watched the evening news, and then took Equanil caplets lifted from my mother.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“I had found the apartment in San Telmo with the help of a motherly rental agent in a pink suit who had tried to cheat me on her percentage not once but twice, and reacted with a broad and charming laugh both times I pointed it out, as if we were flirting on a date and I was removing her hand from my thigh.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“Every year, another old man shouting from a grandstand with all his medals on. ‘I’ve come to replace your previous old man.’ Some”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“It’s a war, Vera.” “That’s the thing, Gerry. It’s not. It’s a game.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“The better a person is, the easier they are to lie to. Have you noticed that?”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“The past is a foreign country, as they say. I lived for nearly a decade as if I had come from nowhere. But there are so many ways to cross a border.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“I was never a real part of his world. No foreigner ever could have been.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“the movie-star revolutionaries were always followed by a bleak and endless repression.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“I had never heard so many political men claim to have so little power.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“For a long time already, I had been half a step from the edge of a cliff. That was how I lived. I did not look over.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“These basic elements of misunderstanding, which were deeper than language, sometimes kept me up at night. It was so difficult to know what people meant from what they said.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“With women I always felt a bit like we were the first two people to ever do what we were doing, that we were inventing it, that we decided in each transaction who we were.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“When the cigarette was done, I put out my self-pity like a light.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“All things flow in the end to a city like that.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“And then there were Hernán and Rafa, muscular brothers who expressed most of their politics through soccer, moving smoothly back and forth between the two topics as if they were one. The character of other countries came out on the field, they said. The Brazilians presumed, the Uruguayans lacked heart, the more prosperous teams aped European styles, and the proletarian ones had the light footwork that you learn when you play on pitted dirt.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me— Well, I could cry about that all day. Who couldn’t?”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“The key only ever gets you halfway there. The rest is always tricks.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“I hadn’t realized that once you started failing it was very hard to stop.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“There was something about it that caught my attention, that slightly hushed air that I knew well, a bar with a hearty clientele who are trying to keep their voices down so the neighbors won’t complain to the police.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“When Nico helps you, he really helps you.” A negative corollary hanging there, unsaid.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“She was, after all, very scrupulously showing me exactly what she thought of me. That kind of honesty put my mind at ease.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“It was a very nice house, which I didn’t realize at the time because it looked like all the other houses in the neighborhood, and I’d never lived anywhere else.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“Back home, I had known that if I was arrested at a dyke bar I would lose my job, and if I lost my job I would end up in a flophouse or worse. I went out anyway, because living was a dry waste if I didn’t.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?

“It was a hiccup, the moment when we looked at each other. Neither of us was supposed to do that, acknowledge each other that way, though I told myself - trying to calm the quiver of surprise as I turned left and continued up the street, pinned to the far side of the sidewalk by his gaze - that it didn't matter. It didn't matter if he knew I'd seen him. I turned in to the Bar las Flores and sat down to wait him out. It was an hour before I looked out and saw the sidewalk was clear, then made my way back to the apartment.”
― Rosalie Knecht, Who Is Vera Kelly?