It Would Be Night in Caracas Quotes

“Writing out the inscription for her headstone, I understood that death takes place in language first, in that act of wrenching subjects from the present and planting them in the past. Completed actions. Things that had a beginning and an end, in a time that’s gone forever. What was but would never be again.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“A primeira morte acontece na linguagem, nesse acto de arrancar os sujeitos do presente para os fixar no passado. Transformá-los em acções acabadas. Coisas que começaram e acabaram num tempo extinto. Aquilo que foi e não voltará a ser.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“Crying counted for nothing. I looked at the bag I’d put everything in and glanced around the room one last time. My mother and I were the last inhabitants of the world that fit inside these walls. Now both were dead: my mother, my home. My country, too.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Life had become a matter of venturing out to hunt and returning home alive. That was what our daily activities had turned into, even burying our dead.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Se tuviera que elegir una de las fronteras que cruzamos, me quedaría con la de su piel. Francisco me fotografiaba con la palma de la mano y la yema de sus dedos. Sin palabras era como mejor nos amábamos. No me concedió ninguna, ni siquiera para decir adiós.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Robaron el florero y ocho letras del epitafio, de la tumba de Adelaida Falcón arrancaron completa la palabra “Descansa”. Quedó el en paz como una deuda que nadie pagaría. También faltaba el apellido y la consonante del pueblo donde ella nació y en el que yo crecí por temporadas. Las habían arrancado una a una hasta dejar letras apagadas, tartamudas, como la efe de Falcón en el rótulo de la pensión de mis tías. Por perder, perdimos hasta el nombre.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Perhaps the sentence I spent the most time reworking was “Tan solo una letra separa «partir» de «parir».” (Just a single letter separates “to leave” from “to give birth.”) In the novel, Adelaida describes the act of adopting a new identity as giving birth to a new self. Birth is given special metaphorical weight, recurring as it does in key scenes that include her recollections of her mother, her realization that she herself will never be one, and her removing Aurora’s body from the building.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Never coming back was the best thing that could happen to any of us.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“They pretended to be suspicious of certain individuals, detaining them so that others who did have cocaine hidden on them could go through. It was profitable to turn a blind eye to the packages, to play for time with the rest of us. Drugs pay more than intimidation. And inspiring fear has its pleasures.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“This official snooped through my things as only authority figures know how when they are busy demonstrating that they are The Authority.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“In this country, no one rests in peace. No one.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Eat or heal, nothing else. The next person in line was always a potential adversary, someone who had more. Those who were still alive fought tooth and claw for the leftovers. Fighting for a place to die in a city devoid of resolutions.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Our determination to get our share of the spoils was such that we forgot compassion.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Why did they take such pains to hide their identity when the law was in their hands?”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Nobody wanted to grow old or appear poor. It was important to conceal, to make over. Those were the national pastimes: keeping up appearances. It didn’t matter if there was no money, or if the country was falling to pieces: the important thing was to be beautiful, to aspire to a crown, to be the queen of something . . . of Carnaval, of the town, of the country. To be the tallest, the prettiest, the most mindless.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“I grew up surrounded by the daughters of immigrants. Girls with dark skin and light eyes. A summation, centuries in the making, of a strange and mestizo country’s practices in the bedroom. Beautiful in its derangements. Generous in beauty and in violence, two of the qualities that it had in greatest abundance. The result was a nation built on the cleft of its own contradictions, on the tectonic fault of a landscape always on the brink of tumbling down on its inhabitants’ heads.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“the congenital disease that in those years afflicted the Venezuelan middle class: the defects of nineteenth-century white Venezuelans grafted onto the chaos of a mixed-race society. A country where women birthed and brought up children on their own, thanks to men who didn’t even bother pretending that they were stepping out for cigarettes when they decided to leave for good.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“That was how everything in the town happened: as if the nineteenth century had never given way to progress. If it weren’t for the public lighting and the Polar beer trucks that climbed the road, nobody would have believed that this was the eighties.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Far more beautiful than their real-life counterparts, my dream trees were always full of pearly plums that transformed into glittery cocoons, sleeping caterpillars, which I thought were beautiful in a strange and slightly repugnant way.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“I grew up in a place full of rusty slides and swing sets, but everyone was too fearful of crime to play on them, and back then the crime rate wasn’t a shadow of what it came to be.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“The funeral parlor had no credit card reader, they didn’t accept bank transfers, and I didn’t have enough cash to cover the quantity requested, which was something like two thousand times my monthly wage. Even if I’d had the cash, they wouldn’t have accepted it. No one wanted cash anymore. Cash was worthless bits of paper.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Me legaron valor. No fui valiente. JORGE LUIS BORGES, «El resentimiento»”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“Conocía a mujeres que barrían patios para ordenar su soledad. Tú también. Una raza extinta.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“Me dolía la cabeza y sentía el cuerpo castigado de permanecer alerta todos los días, a todas horas.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“Me lo quitaron todo, hasta el derecho a gritar.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“alguien que estaba muy lejos de entender el Salon des Refusés, pero que volcaba la luz de los valles valencianos de Venezuela como solo saben hacerlo quienes han sido educados bajo el encandilamiento del trópico. Esa luz que todo lo quema.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“Era la culpa del superviviente, algo parecido a lo que padecieron los que se marchaban del país, una sensación de oprobio y vergüenza: darse de baja del sufrimiento era otra forma de traición.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“«Uno es del lugar donde están enterrados sus muertos».”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española

“Mientras redactaba la inscripción para su tumba, entendí que la primera muerte ocurre en el lenguaje, en ese acto de arrancar a los sujetos del presente para plantarlos en el pasado. Convertirlos en acciones acabadas. Cosas que comenzaron y terminaron en un tiempo extinto. Aquello que fue y no será más”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, It Would Be Night in Caracas

“Todas vestían el uniforme de las milicias civiles: una camiseta roja. Parecían haber dado con el lote de la talla más pequeña. Los vaqueros ajustados resaltaban sus piernas gruesas, rematadas con unos pies elefantiásicos calzados con chancletas de plástico.”
― Karina Sainz Borgo, La hija de la española