top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Chilean Authors
"He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective."
"Donde termina el arco iris,en tu alma o en el horizonte?Where does the rainbow end,in your soul or on the horizon?"
"Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrowsloosens into the night the petals that form your formlet your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladderrung by rung taking off with me in my dream.I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows.Dark is the world's night without you my love."
"Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions."
"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process."
"How accommodating love is, it forgives everything."
"Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span..."
"Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment."
"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
"Y por que el sol es tan mal amigodel caminante en el desierto?Y por que el sol es tan simpaticoen el jardin del hospital?And why is the sun such a bad companionto the traveler in the desert?And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?"
"To harden the earththe rocks took charge:instantlythey grew wings:the rocksthat soared:the survivorsflew upthe lightning bolt,screamed in the night,a watermark,a violet sword,a meteor.The succulentskyhad not only clouds,not only space smelling of oxygen,but an earthly stoneflashing here and therechanged into a dove,changed into a bell,into immensity, into a piercingwind:into a phosphorescent arrow,into salt of the sky."
"We the mortals touch the metals,the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,knowing they will go on, inert or burning,and I was discovering, naming all the these things:it was my destiny to love and say goodbye."
"While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone."
"I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert."
"Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of DAaz Casanueva; in that language in which JoaquAn Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!"
"Accept the children the way we accept trees-with gratitude, because they are a blessing-but do not have expectations or desires. You don't expect trees to change, you love them as they are."
"I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist."
"I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word."
"By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness."
"I love the piece of earth you are,because in all the planetary prairiesI do not have another star. You repeatthe multiplication of the universe."
"I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair."
"From that terrible love the soft pure handsgave peace to my eyes and sun to my senses."
"I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales."
"At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me."
"This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States."
"From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there."
"One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything."
"I move in the university of the waves."
"I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases....."
"As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I'm not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What's done is done; I have to look ahead."
bottom of page