Carolina De Robertis Quotes

Suffering has no measure. There are no scales to weigh it. There is only sorrow after sorrow.

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.

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

She'd seen her mother, her sisters, watched the way they wrapped their days around their men, the way it worked, a code she'd always known she'd avoid for her own life, who wanted it? what was the point? It wasn't worth having a man no matter how much people mocked you for lacking one.

Palo's three older brothers had died in the Paraguayan War, conscripted by the Argentinian government, taken off by force along with all the black men of their generation, because, Palo told young Santiago, they needed a way to not only win their war but also rid this country of us in the process, two birds with one stone. Buenos Aires was too black for them, one third of the population, that's enough blackness to swallow you up! to get strong on you! and so they sent our fathers off to war and opened floodgates to European steamships so that white men would pour into the city to replace us, and their plan worked, the bastarda, look at our city now.

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

What makes the self?
Experiences. Acculturation.
What else?
I don't know.
What's within you.
She says, I don't know what was within me and what got put there by my life as it was lived.
You can never know that.
No.
But there is a you that was there before you were born and that nobody shaped or changed or could have changed.

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

...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.

Nothing changes if we just feel shitty about being White. And nothing changes if we refuse to talk about it. The opposite of white pride does not have to be white shame. We can't push it away and pretend it's not us. We are not color-blind, we are not post-race, we do not get to reject our whiteness because it makes us feel bad…This does not get solved with a Celebration of Diversity Day and a coexist bumper sticker. (Kate Schatz)

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

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.

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.

It was her grandfather who'd told her the tale of this particular violin, over and over, as if the telling could stave off loss, as if the weight and scope of human history were not found in books or in those mythic universities in Rome and Naples that no one in their village had ever seen but, rather, were encoded in objects like this one, a violin touched by hundreds of hands, loved, used, stroked, pressed, made to outlive its owners, storing their secrets and lies

No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don't understand that, if you've never been in such a family, then you can't know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice.

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

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.

But in the morning I would always rise and polish the surface of myself, a gleaming, confident young woman, an excellent student and good daughter starting her fourth year at the university, moving smoothly through the world, and even though inside the chaos scraped and railed I would push it into the crevices of the day so it could not be detected.

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.

...this, he thinks, is the true curve of the world - now I glimpse it: all things are blended under the surface like the mass of us were blended in the water, it's the separateness of skin and rock and mind that is the great illusion. We are not discrete; we are not solid. People and things and even cities are meant to flow together, they are meant to connect, and this is why we're always full of longing, the way I long for the girl, and the girl longs for truth, and the truth longs for volume, and volume longs for people to hear it, and people long for - what? - for everything, air, home, violence, chaos, beauty, hope, flight, sight, each other. Always, whether to stroke or maim, each other, above all.

The pragmatic part of my mind had come undone, its order dismantled by droves of thoughts that clamored to be noticed, to be touched, to be seen. I could not touch them all at once. I could not address the future when I had barely begun to address the crowded past. The mind is elastic but not infinite, it can only pull so far at once before it starts to break apart, and Time, it turned out, was not a river at all but an ocean, spreading in all directions, disorderly and vast, swirling with spiraled currents. You never knew where you might drift, or what would become of you along the way.

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.

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!

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.