Lost Children Archive Quotes

“Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don't fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.”
― Valeria Luiselli , Lost Children Archive

“Why is it that looking through someone's things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of their person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape?”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, re-enacted, reinterpreted, the world, it’s fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it wound its way around a sun, and in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. And maybe the boy’s frustration at not knowing what to take a picture of, or how to frame and focus the things he sees as we all sit inside the car, driving across this strange, beautiful, dark country, is simply a sign of how our ways of documenting the world have fallen short. Perhaps if we found a new way to document it, we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time. Novels and movies don’t quite capture it; journalism doesn’t; photography, dance, painting, and theater don’t; molecular biology and quantum physics certainly don’t either. We haven’t understood how space and time exist now, how we really experience them. And until we find a way to document them, we will not understand them.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere – in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere—in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Euphemisms hide, erase, coat. Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget. Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“When I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else's words enter your consciosuness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They're not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit top of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone's words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And hat recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Aunque un archivo valioso de los niños perdidos debería estar compuesto, en lo fundamental, por una serie de testimonios o historias orales que registren sus propias voces contando sus experiencias, no me parece correcto convertir a esos niños, sus vidas, en material de consumo mediático. ¿Por qué? ¿Para qué? ¿Para qué otros puedan escucharlos y sentir lástima? ¿Rabia? ¿Y después hacer qué? Nadie decide no ir a trabajar y comenzar una huelga de hambre tras escuchar la radio en la mañana. Todo el mundo sigue con su vida, sin importar la gravedad de las noticias que escuchan, a menos que la gravedad se refiera al clima.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“I also knew you wouldn't remember this trip, because you're only five years old, and our pediatrician had told us that children don't starting building memories of things until after they turn six. When I realized that, that I was ten and you were only five, I thought, fuck. But of course I didn't say so out loud. I just thought, fuck, silently, to myself. I realized that I'd remember everything and you maybe wouldn't remember anything. I needed to find a way to help you remember, even if it was only through things I documented for you, for the future. And that's how I became a documentarist and a documentarian at the same time. (p 213)”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather - more a whimper than a bang.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months. All those children were fleeing circumstances of unspeakable abuse and systematic violence, fleeing countries where gangs had become parastates, had usurped power and taken over the rule of law. They had come to the United States looking for protection, looking for mothers, fathers, or other relatives who had migrated earlier and might take them in. They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Beginnings get confused with endings. We look at them the way a goat or a skunk might stare stupidly toward a horizon where there’s a sun, not knowing if the yellow star there is rising or setting.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“I also like the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant. She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Ve benden uzaklaşan şeyleri kovalamak için hem fazla yaşlı hem de fazla gencim.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

“Experimentamos el tiempo de manera distinta. Nadie ha logrado captar realmente lo que sucede ni por qué. Tal vez es sólo que sentimos la ausencia de futuro, porque el presente se ha vuelto demasiado abrumador y por tanto se nos ha hecho imposible imaginar un futuro. Y sin futuro, el tiempo se percibe nada más como una acumulación. Una acumulación de meses, días, desastres naturales, series de televisión, atentados terroristas, divorcios, migraciones masivas, cumpleaños, fotografías, amaneceres. No hemos entendido la forma exacta en la que ahora se experimenta el tiempo. Y quizás la frustración del niño al no saber qué fotografiar, o cómo encuadrar y enfocar las cosas que observa desde el coche, mientras atravesamos este paisaje extraño, sea simplemente un signo de cómo nuestras maneras de documentar el mundo resultan insuficientes. Tal vez si encontramos una nueva manera de documentarlo empezaremos a entender esta nueva forma de experimentar el tiempo y el espacio. Las novelas y las películas no logran captarlo del todo; tampoco el periodismo; la fotografía, la danza, la pintura y el teatro no lo captan; la biología molecular y la física cuántica tampoco, desde luego. No hemos entendido cómo es que existe el tiempo y el espacio en nuestros días, como los experimentamos realmente. Y hasta que encontremos una forma de documentarlos, no los entenderemos. Le digo al niño: Sólo tienes que encontrar tu propia forma de entender el espacio, para que el resto de nosotros nos sintamos menos perdidos en el tiempo.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Desierto sonoro

“books like Peter Pan, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that short story by García Márquez, “Light Is Like Water,” and of course Lord of the Flies—are nothing but desperate attempts by adults to come to terms with childhood. That although they seem to be stories about children’s worlds—worlds without adults—they are in fact stories about an adult’s world when there are children in it, about the way that children’s imaginations destabilize our adult sense of reality and force us to question the very grounds of that reality. The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected from other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.”
― Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive