Valeria Luiselli Quotes

#1. as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing.

Valeria Luiselli

#2. The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.

Valeria Luiselli

#3. Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you'll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery.

Valeria Luiselli

#4. Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.

Valeria Luiselli

#5. There's nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects.

Valeria Luiselli

#6. In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe.

Valeria Luiselli

#7. I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I'd been elaborating for years.

Valeria Luiselli

#8. The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or - even worse - might be a tourist.

Valeria Luiselli

#9. Perhaps it's right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable.

Valeria Luiselli

#10. I've always thought that hell is the people you could one day become. The most frightening ones.

Valeria Luiselli

#11. That's the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It's all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.

Valeria Luiselli

#12. My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.

Valeria Luiselli

#13. When a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, these bones that walk, this mouth, this hand that writes.

Valeria Luiselli

#14. Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.

Valeria Luiselli

#15. I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn.

Valeria Luiselli

#16. But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave.

Valeria Luiselli