Alejandro Zambra Quotes

#1. What greater happiness than to know that move exists, that I can watch it many times, that I can watch it always.

Alejandro Zambra

#2. I must say that my father is innocent. I should say it. I have to say it. I'm obliged to say it. My father will kill me if I don't say he is innocent. The children of murderers cannot kill the father.

Alejandro Zambra

#3. Because we can't, we don't know how to talk about a movie or a book anymore; the moment has come when movies and novels don't matter, only the time we saw them, read them: where we were, what we were doing, who we were then.

Alejandro Zambra

#4. Everyone gets erased -- life consists of meeting people whom first you love and then you erase -- but you can't erase children, you can't erase parents.

Alejandro Zambra

#5. I was going to be a memory when I grew up.

Alejandro Zambra

#6. I knew little, but at least I knew that: no one could speak for someone else. That although we might want to tell other people's stories, we always end up telling our own.

Alejandro Zambra

#7. To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it.

Alejandro Zambra

#8. I always thought I didn't have real childhood memories. That my history fit into a few lines. One one page, maybe. In large print. I don't think that anymore.

Alejandro Zambra

#9. Growing up, I meant to be a memory.

Alejandro Zambra

#10. What's the purpose of being with someone if they don't change your life? She said that, and Julio was present when she said it: that life only had purpose if you found someone who changed it, who destroyed your life.

Alejandro Zambra

#11. I remember thinking, without pride of self-pity, that I was not rich or poor, that I wasn't good or bad. But that was difficult: to be neither good nor bad. It seemed to me, in the end, the same as being bad.

Alejandro Zambra