Valeria Lipovetsky Quotes

Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken. ~ Valeria Luiselli

I already love in you your beauty, but I am only beginning to love in you that which is eternal and ever precious – your heart, your soul. Beauty one could get to know and fall in love with in one hour and cease to love it as speedily; but the soul one must learn to know. Believe me, nothing on earth is given without labour, even love, the most beautiful and natural of feelings,But the more difficult the labour and hardship, the higher the reward,"

Count Leo Tolstoi to Valeria Arsenev, his fiance. November 2, 1856 ~ Leo Tolstoy

Everything else seemed trivial; like talking about your favourite film while your airplane is falling out of the sky. ~ Valeria Kogan

Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything. ~ Valeria Luiselli

I feel Italian, but I also feel French," she said. "Italy is deeper. France is strong, but it's after." Actually, one of the surprises about meeting [Valeria Bruni Tedeschi] is how Italian she seems. Though she has no trace of an Italian accent when speaking French - and says that, in Italian, she shows signs of having lived in France - she sounds Italian when speaking English. There is no suggestion of French at all. ~ Mick LaSalle

Oren tells Marcus: You have a peaceful, noble heart. But as we discussed last night, some men deserve to die. Valeria knows that. ~ Scott Robert Scheller

I'd never stop traveling, and I love bringing my family along with me. My children have points of reference everywhere, friends from Milan to Los Angeles. I think it's really fun for them. ~ Valeria Mazza

The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard- instead of numbers, we add up bodies. ~ Valeria Luiselli

He spoke slowly, as if searching for adjectives in the darkness. ~ Valeria Luiselli

She was the world to me.
Of course, I knew nothing about my own world. ~ Valeria Teles

Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness. ~ Valeria Luiselli

There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from my different angles, by many different minds. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Dyeing my hair has become a kind of addiction. I can't see myself as anything other than blond. Once you go blond, you stay blond forever. ~ Valeria Mazza

Elijah: You are a dangerous woman.
Valeria: You do not know the half of it, but I suppose you are not one to always dabble in safe waters either. So, do you still want to work with me?
Elijah: It will be my pleasure.
Valeria: Is there anything I need to know about you?
Elijah: No!
Valeria: That is a lie.
Elijah: Is there anything I need to know about you?
Valeria: No!
Elijah: That is also a lie.
Valeria, smiling: Then we are a pair of liars. ~ Cristina M. Sburlea

However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Valeria," the mayor's wife asked. "Are you all right this morning? My husband has been asking about you."
"Yes, desire. Quite. Don't you look lovely today. ~ Marc Fitten

The truth is there isn't anything to me at all. All I know is that I can't sleep well, I can't dream well and I'm quite in love with you. That's all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it's not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That's when I realise you're dead. That's when I remember you've been gone for years. That's when I remember I'm awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever. ~ F.K. Preston

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

Are you free of each other, pretty Mrs. Valeria, by common consent of both parties? ~ Wilkie Collins

I'm even flattered! It's what success is like. I'm happy I seem unreal to them, it means I'm doing a good job, ~ Valeria Lukyanova

I worked with fantastic actors, fantastic directors. People I would never otherwise have met. Was I limited? Yes. Did I use it as I could have? No. But I was always ambivalent about Hollywood and what I wanted. And ambivalence in our business is no good for success. ~ Valeria Golino

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

The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather - more a whimper than a bang. ~ Valeria Luiselli

In the kitchen Valeria was making breakfast, his aunt never made breakfast even though Carlo insisted for years that a hotel hoping to cater to French and Americans must offer breakfast. "It's a lazy man's meal.", she always said. "What laggard expects to eat before doing any work? ~ Jess Walter

Although it might seem paradoxical, growing up in a family of liberal-minded atheists, committed but never militant, tends to have devastating consequences. Being raised without a rigid backdrop of religious, political, or spiritual beliefs makes it hard to have a real crises later in life. There is no way forward if your point of departure is the comfortable passivity of someone who has been a self-professed agnostic since the age of twelve, without ever having considered those important - one might say grave - matters, such as God, death, love, failure, or fear. For a precocious agnostic, the virtues offered by skepticism become terrifying hands that strangle and suffocate the already rare capacity of an individual to question things. Conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believe is open to doubt - stark, brutal doubt - can truly enjoy a profound crises that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Ever since I was left somewhat alone, without gods, I have been a ferocious believer in the power of small coincidences. ~ Valeria Luiselli

I can touch my toes, but I bend in a strange way. I'll never be in the Olympics. ~ Valeria Golino

The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or - even worse - might be a tourist. ~ Valeria Luiselli

I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, produce an afterglow. When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it'll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere – in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this. ~ Valeria Lukyanova

I came to Hollywood and I loved it. It was a great time, but in my head I was still elsewhere, in Europe. I believed in a certain cinema, which I still do believe in - a certain European cinema - and as a young woman being in America, I thought I was being taken away from that. ~ Valeria Golino

Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past. ~ Valeria Luiselli

The very idea of having children brings out this deep revulsion in me. ~ Valeria Lukyanova

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

Before the immigration crisis was declared in the summer of 2014, minors seeking immigration relief were given approximately twelve months to find a lawyer to represent their case before their first court hearing. But when the crisis was declared and Obama's administration created the priority juvenile docket, that window was reduced to twenty-one days. In real and practical terms, what the creation of that priority docket meant was that the cases involving unaccompanied minors from Central America were grouped together and moved to the top of the list of pending cases in immigration court. Being moved to the top of a list, in this context, was the least desirable thing - at least from the point of view of the children involved. Basically, the priority juvenile docket implied that deportation proceedings against them were accelerated by 94 percent, and that both they and the organizations that normally provided legal representation now had much less time to build a defense. ~ Valeria Luiselli

I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other's solitude. ~ Valeria Luiselli

In some countries, women aren't allowed to wear a swimsuit. ~ Valeria Mazza

Why did you come to the United States? Perhaps no one knows the real answer. I know that migrants, when they are still on their way here, learn the Immigrant's Prayer. A friend who had been aboard La Bestia for a few days, working on a documentary, read it to me once. I didn't learn the entire thing, but I remember these lines: 'Partir es morir un poco / Llegar nunca es llegar' - 'To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Life simply blew through her. ~ Valeria Kogan

But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces- it's also the first draft of a future face... In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I'll rewrite and understand on a future reading. ~ Valeria Luiselli

Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight. ~ Valeria Luiselli

There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy. ~ Valeria Golino