top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Chilean Authors
"Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process."
"I was such a sullen, angry, sad kid. I'm sure there are writers who have had happy childhoods, but what are you going to write about? No ghosts, no fear. I'm very happy that I had an unhappy and uncomfortable childhood."
"There's basically an element of fiction in everything you remember. Imagination and memory are almost the same brain processes. When I write fiction, I know that I'm using a bunch of lies that I've made up to create some form of truth. When I write a memoir, I'm using true elements to create something that will always be somehow fictionalized."
"Every day you play with the light of the universe."
"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."
"There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always."
"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."
"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."
"Give, give, give - what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don't give it away? Of having stories if I don't tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don't share it? I don't intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine."
"For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time."
"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....."
"My beauty, flower by flower, star by star,wave by wave, love, I have counted your body."
"From that terrible love the soft pure handsgave peace to my eyes and sun to my senses."
"Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly."
"Write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway."
"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..."
"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."
"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
"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."
"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."
"By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness."
"In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my heart, my dreams, everything becomes connected with a new book, and nothing else really matters."
"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!"
"Women have always been courageous... They are always fearless when protecting their children and in the last century they have been fearless in the fight for their rights."
"Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy...."
"Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment."
"You will fall with me as a stone in the grave."
"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."
bottom of page