Carolina De Robertis Quotes

#1. Music, arrow to pierce all barriers. Music, the great equalizer. Music, invader of centuries. Nectar of demons, whiskey flask of God.

Carolina De Robertis

#2. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.
(Hari Kunzru)

Carolina De Robertis

#3. ...if you don't script your own way once and for all, your story will be written by someone else, and your actions will be guided by other people's dreams of who you should be rather than by the bright jagged thing you really are.

Carolina De Robertis

#4. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. (Junot Diaz)

Carolina De Robertis

#5. A music born among children of slaves is like an orphan: it will never know its real parents, will never hear the full visceral story of its birth.

Carolina De Robertis

#6. Words are incomplete and yet we need them. They are the cups that give our memories shape, and keep them from trickling away.

Carolina De Robertis

#7. Life was full of lost worlds. You could travel miles of twisting roads and think you're far away from all you know and suddenly stumble on the scrap of one.

Carolina De Robertis

#8. And isn't that strange, she thought, the way one city can swirl inside another; the way you can be in one country yet carry another country in your skin; the way a place is changed by whoever comes to it, the way silt invades the body of a river.

Carolina De Robertis

#9. She didn't mind the sacrifice. It seemed enough for a life, to give yourself to music the way nuns give themselves to God. To vow. To surrender. Only music, after all, made life bearable. Only with music did she feel--what was it? Free? Happy? No, it was something else. Awake.

Carolina De Robertis

#10. You are an ally because of your actions, not because you say you are. (Kate Schatz)

Carolina De Robertis

#11. As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests.

Carolina De Robertis

#12. When days are scarce what better way to spend them than in a bout of madness.

Carolina De Robertis

#13. He was like a bottle and music was the wine.... She liked to be near him when it poured.

Carolina De Robertis

#14. I want to believe in prophecies more than policies. I want to listen to poets rather than pollsters.

Carolina De Robertis

#15. That's what happens to melodies: they get lost in the air. Just like memories. And the body. Memories and melodies and the body dissolve after we die. A musical instrument is not like the body, not at all: like the soul, it carries on.

Carolina De Robertis

#16. So that's all we're doingoing here now? Catering to the rich?'

'We'really here for the tango,' Santiago said. 'Our music will reach far more people because we'really here'

'And the workers? The tango came from us, it belongs to us!

Carolina De Robertis

#17. She wondered why no one saw through her disguise. Perhaps people could see only what they expected, what fit inside their vision, as if human vision came in precut shapes more narrow than the world itself, and this allowed her to hide in plain sight.

Carolina De Robertis

#18. She was awake, alive, full of ideas like branches in a greenhouse, growing thick and rife against the glass.

Carolina De Robertis

#19. Rosa leaned forward. 'We don't have the least idea what life can be.'

'We don't?'

'No.'

'Then how do we find out?'

Rosa wiped tears from Dante's face with her fingers. The gesture was firm as it was tender. 'We plunge.

Carolina De Robertis