Juan Gabriel Vasquez Quotes

A person is from wherever they feel best, and roots are for plants. Everyone knows that, don't they?

Childhood doesn't exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams.

The I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else's misery.

If there's one thing I regret it's not having told my father how much I admired and loved him. My only gesture of affection was a quick kiss on the forehead two days before he died. The kiss tasted like sugar and I felt like a thief who furtively stole something that no longer belong to anybody. Why do we hide our feelings? Out of cowardice? Out of egotism? With a mother it's different: we cover her with flowers, gifts and sweet phrases. What is it that prevents us from affectionately confronting our father and telling him, face to face, how much we love or admire him? On the other hand, why do we curse him under our breath when he puts us in our place? Why do we react with wickedness and not affection when the occasion presents itself? Why are we brave with taunts and cowards with affection? Why did I never tell my father these things but I tell them to you, who are probably too young to understand them yet? One night I wanted to speak to my father ion his room but found him asleep. As I quietly began to leave the room, I heard my sleeping father, in a desperate voice, say: "No, papa, no!" What strange, agitated dream was my father experiencing with his father? And if one thing caught my attention, beyond the enigma of the dream, was that my father was seventy-eight years old at that time and my grandfather had been dead for at least a quarter of a century. Does a man have to die to speak to his father?

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read).

So you fell out of the sky, too? the Little Prince asked the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I'd fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde's fall, human lives don't have these technological luxuries to fall back on.

I don't know when I started to realize that my country's past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i'd believed so trustworthy and predictable - the place I'd grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand - began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don't write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that's how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don't know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound di

Where does the past go when it changes?

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.

What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over.

Rootlessness had no color, however. It makes no difference to live in one place or another and being born here or there was an accident. One was a chameleon, countries and people mere scenery.

They talked of intentions and projects, convinced, as only new lovers can be, that saying what you wanted was the same as saying who you are.

I read somewhere that a man should tell the story of his life at the age of forty, and this deadline is fast approaching as I write these lines, only a few short weeks remain before this ominous birthday arrives.

The world's a scary place these days. Grandpa,, you've seen worse things, haven't you? Please tell me the world has always been like this.

Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.

A person doesn't have to do anything but die.

Her face was like a party that everyone had left.

There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has.

The nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.

At the end of my second year I understood something I'd been incubating for several months: that my law studies were of no interest or use to me whatsoever, for my only obsession was reading fiction and, finally, learning how to write it.

Elaine complained about this at night, in her matrimonial bed, and then complained that in Colombia all the citizens were political but no politician wanted to do anything for the citizens.

Sometimes I think," he told me the only time we talked somewhat seriously, "I've never looked anyone in the eye." It was an exaggeration, but I'm not sure the man was exaggerating on purpose. After all, he wasn't looking me in the eye when he said those words.

I swear, I have really tried to care about genres or categories, but I find myself sadly unable to do so. I will enjoy anything, anything, as long as it comes written in language that is personal to the point of idiosyncratic, euphonious, revealing and precise. I avoid any kind of writing that doesn't fill these requirements. I don't care which genre it belongs to.