The Shape of the Ruins Quotes

“Childhood doesn’t exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children’s fables, and also into place in the memory or the imagination, a place where we go as tourists, to revive nostalgia or to try to find something we’ve lost.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“It wasn’t the first time someone had disappeared from my life due to my own fault: due to my tendency to solitude and silence, dut to my sometimes unjustifiable reserve, due to my inability to keep relationships alive (even those I have with people I love or who genuinely interest me). This has always been one of my great defects, and it has caused me more than one disappointment and has dissapointed other more than once. There’s nothing I can do aboutn it, however, because nobody changes their nature by the mere force of will.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“If there’s one thing I regret it’s not having told my father how much I admired and loved him. My only gesture of affection was a quick kiss on the forehead two days before he died. The kiss tasted like sugar and I felt like a thief who furtively stole something that no longer belong to anybody. Why do we hide our feelings? Out of cowardice? Out of egotism? With a mother it’s different: we cover her with flowers, gifts and sweet phrases. What is it that prevents us from affectionately confronting our father and telling him, face to face, how much we love or admire him? On the other hand, why do we curse him under our breath when he puts us in our place? Why do we react with wickedness and not affection when the occasion presents itself? Why are we brave with taunts and cowards with affection? Why did I never tell my father these things but I tell them to you, who are probably too young to understand them yet? One night I wanted to speak to my father ion his room but found him asleep. As I quietly began to leave the room, I heard my sleeping father, in a desperate voice, say: “No, papa, no!” What strange, agitated dream was my father experiencing with his father? And if one thing caught my attention, beyond the enigma of the dream, was that my father was seventy-eight years old at that time and my grandfather had been dead for at least a quarter of a century. Does a man have to die to speak to his father?”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“The city was poisoned with the venom of small fundamentalisms, and the venom ran beneath us, like dirty water in the sewers.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“At the end of my second year I understood something I’d been incubating for several months: that my law studies were of no interest or use to me whatsoever, for my only obsession was reading fiction and, finally, learning how to write it.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“¿En qué momento nos volvimos así? Varias veces al día me llegaba la convicción molesta de que los bogotanos, si tuvieran la oportunidad, no dudarían en apretar el botón que borrara para siempre a los detestables otros: a los ateos, a los obreros, a los ricos, a los homosexuales, a los negros, a los comunistas, a los empresarios, a los partidarios del presidente, a los partidarios del expresidente, a los hinchas de Millonarios, a los hinchas de Santa Fe. La ciudad estaba envenenada con el veneno de los pequeños fundamentalismos, y el veneno corría por debajo, como el agua sucia en las cloacas; y”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“a la muerte se la llama Esclava del destino y el azar, de reyes y desesperados; cuando se la acusa de vivir con el veneno, la guerra y la enfermedad.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“... todo el tiempo se abren entre nosotros y los demás vacíos inabarcables, y el espejismo de la comprensión o la empatía es sólo eso, un espejismo. Estamos todos encerrados en nuestra propia experiencia incomunicable, y la muerte es la experiencia más incomunicable de todas, y después de la muerte, la experiencia más incomunicable es el deseo de morir.”
― Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Auteur), The Shape of the Ruins

“No, no se controla el olvido, no hemos aprendido a hacerlo nunca a pesar de que nuestra mente funcionaría mejor si pudiéramos: si lográramos algún dominio sobre la manera en que el pasado se inmiscuye en el presente.”
― Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Auteur), The Shape of the Ruins

“Siempre es difícil, pensé, el ejercicio de leer un documento de otros tiempos con los ojos de quienes lo leyeron en el momento de su aparición. Hay quienes nunca llegan a hacerlo, pensé; y por eso n o se comunicarán nunca con el pasado: permanecerán por siempre sordos a sus susurros, a los secretos que nos cuenta, a la comprensión de sus mecanismos misteriosos.”
― Juan Gabriel Vasquez (Auteur), The Shape of the Ruins

“A Zapruder lo imagino como un cincuentón”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“Contact sustained with other people’s paranoias, which are multifarious and lie hidden behind the most tranquil personalities, work on us without our noticing, and if you don’t watch out, you can end up investing your energy in silly arguments with people who devote their lives to irresponsible conjectures.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“arrived at the space where in the year 1948 the Agustín Nieto building stood (I”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“Entendió que toda esa gente convencida de que a Gaitán lo iban a matar no era distinta de los que oyeron, con 40 días de anticipación, que iban a matar a Uribe. Entendió eso, Vásquez, entendió eso tan terrible: que los mató la misma gente. Por supuesto que no hablo de los mismos individuos con las mismas manos, no. Hablo de un monstruo, un monstruo inmortal, el monstruo de muchas caras y muchos nombres que tantas veces ha matado y matará otra vez, porque aquí nada ha cambiado en siglos de existencia y no va a cambiar jamás, porque este triste país nuestro es como un ratón corriendo en un carrusel”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“No sé cuando comencé a darme cuenta de que el pasado de mi país me resultaba incomprensible y oscuro, un verdadero terreno de tinieblas, ni puedo recordar el momento preciso en que todo aquello que yo había creído tan confiable y predecible – el lugar donde crecí, cuya lengua hablo y cuyas costumbres conozco, el lugar cuyo pasado me enseñaron en el colegio y en la universidad, cuyo presente me he acostumbrado a interpretar y fingir que comprendo – se empezó a convertir en un lugar de sombras del cual saltaban criaturas horribles no bien nos descuidábamos. Con el tiempo he pensado que es ésta la verdadera razón por la que los escritores escriben sobre los lugares de su infancia y adolescencia y aun de su temprana juventud: no se escribe sobre lo que se conoce y comprende, y mucho menos se escribe porque se conoce y comprende, sino justamente porque se da cuenta uno de que todo su conocimiento y su comprensión eran falsos, un espejismo, una ilusión, de modo que sus libros no son, no podrán nunca ser, más que elaboradas muestras de desorientación: extensas y multiformes declaraciones de perplejidad”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“A la gente como Carballo los podemos llamar locos, paranoicos, desocupados, lo que usted quiera. Pero esa gente le dedica toda su vida a buscar la verdad sobre algo importante. Puede que lo hagan por los medios equivocados. Puede que su pasión los lleve a cometer excesos y a convencerse de sandeces. Pero están haciendo algo que ni usted ni yo podemos hacer. Sí, pueden ser incómodos, pueden dañar reuniones con sus salidas de tono o sus opiniones políticamente incorrectas. Pueden ser torpes en sociedad, meter la pata cada dos por tres, ser impertinentes o incluso insultantes. Pero nos prestan un servicio, me parece a mí, porque permanecen vigilantes, porque no tragan entero, así lo que se imaginen sea descabellado”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“la contradictoria mezcla de repugnancia y fascinación,”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“I don't know when I started to realize that my country's history was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that I'd believed so trustworthy and predictable--the place where I'd grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand--began to turn into a place of shadows out of which jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. (p. 441)”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“What you call history is no more than the winning story, Vásquez. Someone made that story win, and not any of the others, and that's why we believe it today. Or rather: we believe it because it got written down, because it wasn't lost in the endless hole of words that only get said, or even worse, that aren't even spoken, but are only though. (p.450-451)”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“he understood that terrible truth: that they were killed by the same people. Of course I’m not talking about the same individuals with the same hands, no. I’m talking about a monster, an immortal monster, the monster of many faces and many names who has so often killed and will kill again, because nothing has changed here in centuries of existence and never will change, because this sad country of ours is like a mouse running on a wheel.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Shape of the Ruins

“Do you dream of your victims?” he asked.
“Yes,” the murderer told him. “But only when I’m awake.”
Anzola had never heard a more perfect definition of guilt, and didn’t ask him anything else on the subject.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“The First World War, which at that moment was not the first, since they were unaware of the possibility of a second, but the Great War. That’s what they called it: the Great War. They also called it, with populist optimism, the War to End All Wars. The name of that conflict has changed over the years, as perhaps the nature of the explanation we’ve invented to talk about it has changed. Our capacity to name things is limited, and those limits are that much more sensitive or cruel if the things we’re trying to name have disappeared forever. That’s what the past is: a tale, a tale constructed over another tale, an artifice of verbs and nouns where we might be able to capture human pain, their fear of death and eagerness to live, their homesickmness while battling in the trenches, the worry for the soldier who has gone to the fields of Flanders and who might already be dead when we remember him.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“Outside the hospital,” said Benavides with a hint of impatience, “I do not speak of my terminal patients. It’s a decision I made many years ago and it still seems the best decision I ever made. One has to keep one’s lives separate, Vasquez. If not, one can go crazy. This is exhausting, it sucks one’s energy. And like any other person, I have limited energy.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“...we spend most of our time... misinterpreting others, reading them in the wrong key, trying to take a leap toward them and then falling into the abyss. There is no real way to know what goes on inside, though the illusion might be never so attractive: all the time vast spaces open between us and others, and the mirage of comprehension or empathy is just that, a mirage. We are all enclosed in our own incommunicable experience, and death is the least communicable experience of all, and after death, the most incommunicable experience is the desire to die.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“In few places is there such a high concentration of hypocrisy as at a writer’s funeral.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“Looking at him, nobody would ever have imagined that inside his briefcase were the bones of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Sometimes I went with him, a boy hand in hand with his father, and my father would then have a living boy in one hand and a briefcase of dead bones in the other. Bones, furthermore, for which anyone would have killed right there.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas

“El trabajo de comenzar una vida nueva en otro país no es más sencillo cuando se trata del propio; concentrado como estaba en los enigmas de mi llegada, en interpretar las mil y una formas en que la mentalidad y el temperamento de mi ciudad se habían transformado en los años de mi ausencia, no”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, La forma de las ruinas