Horizontal Vertigo Quotes

“True utopia escapes known time. That is one of the insights of the film Brazil, whose settings suggest an aged future: the typewriters and the clothes are older than ours, and that confers on them a strange verisimilitude. The future is more credible if it’s already used.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“utopia means “there is no such place.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“Juan wants to die for his country, he came to say goodbye, he wanted to meet me before they blow his brains out. Cute, isn’t he? People do strange things before going to war.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“During vacation, my father would take us to the beach without removing his suit or taking off his tie.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“The Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo says that part of the charm of modern shopping malls (el shopping as they say in Argentina) derives from establishing a contact with products you can’t buy but which are right there before your eyes. Like television, the mall follows a “logic of celebrity.” Just because you don’t have the money to buy Armani clothes doesn’t mean you can’t admire and even touch them.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“If you ever feel that something you’ve written is impeccable, add a defect,” Augusto Monterroso told me in his unforgettable short story workshop. Sometimes, I feel there’s a burr on a literary passage, an impurity that alters it but doesn’t ruin it and renders it dear to my heart in a world where only the unreal aspires to perfection.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“The sellers call you, with less insistence than the hookers in bars or the employees at the duty-free shop at the airport.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“My grandmother traveled in a Hispano-Suiza automobile, wore Balenciaga, stayed at the Hotel Carlton in Bilbao, and took part in the Wagner cycles at Bayreuth.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“His family names revealed that he came from a town so small that there proximity blended with incest. His double last name was Villoro Villoro.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“Another unusual detail is that Cuauhtémoc’s pose was imitated by the exceptional soccer forward, Cuauhtémoc Blanco, who for about twenty years (1992–2012) was the supreme virtuoso of Mexican soccer. Born in the Tlatilco neighborhood, Blanco dashed about the playing field with the sassiness of someone who came from a place where soccer was played dodging cars from which players often stole rearview mirrors. He regularly copied the pose of his Aztec namesake until the prim authorities asked him not to disrespect a symbol of the nation. But”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“The house was demolished, but I managed to see it in the first full-length feature film in Mexican cinematography: The Gray Automobile. Based on real events, the movie combines scenes reenacted by actors with elements of what would later be called cinéma vérité:”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“Charles de Gaulle said it was impossible to govern a nation with 246 kinds of cheese. In Mexico, statistics are a form of conjecture: we simply do not know how many chiles there are. We do know there are a hell of a lot.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“When what is currently the symbol of Paris was completed, a friend was surprised to find Maupassant in the restaurant on top of the building. How was it possible that a declared enemy of the tower was there? Maupassant’s response was irrefutable: “It’s the only place where you can’t see the Eiffel Tower.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“Saint Judas Thaddeus, Jude the Apostle, patron saint of lost causes.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“The bottles were glass and had to be returned. They entered the house as loans, something that reinforced the certainty, which existed then, that either there were few thieves or that the thieves had no interest in milk.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“Made desperate by our incomprehension, she would say, “I’m killing my turkey,” which meant “I give up.”
― Juan Villoro, Horizontal Vertigo: A City Called Mexico

“Como nuestro mejor remedio para las desgracias son los chistes, al día siguiente mi hermana llamó para decir: “Yo padezco influencia porcina: por eso estoy tan gorda”.”
― Juan Villoro, El vértigo horizontal