By Night In Chile Quotes
"I am dying now, but I still have many things to say. I used to be at peace with myself. Quiet and at peace."
"One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences."
"My name is Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix. I am Chilean."
"Life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth."
"In this barbaric country, the critic’s path is not strewn with roses."
"My aims are peace and responsibility for one’s actions, for one’s words and silences."
"A smile from me. Fresh-faced. I didn’t have time to change."
"And then I thought: The second woe is past, and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly."
"I remember I stepped back. I got tangled up in a sheet."
"The syncopated serpent of the conga line kept moving steadily towards my corner, lifting first its left legs all at once, then the right ones."
"All conversation, all dialogue, is forbidden, said a voice."
"What more could I have wanted? Well, perhaps the murmur of a stream. The pure song of water on stones."
"I smiled at them, said something, asked them the way to the lodge at Là-bas and walked away."
"The way in which the Guatemalan accepted his defeat, with a clear-sightedness reaching far beyond the realm of the particular and the anecdotal, made the hair on our diplomat’s arms stand up."
"In his entire memoirs, Jünger mentions only one Chilean, and that is Salvador Reyes."
"I had a vision of torrential grace, burnished like the dreams of heroes."
"It’s good to love. It’s bad to be impressionable."
"The literature of heroism was vast. So vast that two people with diametrically opposed tastes and ideas could dip into it at random without any likelihood of hitting on the same thing."
"Every hero the Empire had produced would have his life-size statue erected on the hill, and there would even be statues of certain foreign heroes, but only in very special cases."
"The hill that seemed to have been transported from another world and set down there as a reminder to man, to steady the heart, to soothe the soul, to delight the senses."
"What they stammer out in fact is nothing more than our defeat, the joust in which we have fallen although we do not know it."
"We perceive time in three dimensions only, although in fact it has four or maybe five, like the castellated shadow of Sordello, which Sordello?"
"An uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are."
"One should aim to learn something new every day."
"We were all normal, discreet, logical, balanced, careful, sensible people, we all knew that something had to be done, that certain things were necessary, there’s a time for sacrifice and a time for thinking reasonably."
"Sometimes, at night, I would sit on a chair in the dark and ask myself what difference there was between fascist and rebel. Just a pair of words. Two words, that’s all. And sometimes either one will do!"
"We were bored. We read and we got bored. We intellectuals."
"Splendid isolation has never been our style, and back then, as now, Chilean artists and writers needed to gather and talk, ideally in a pleasant setting where they could find intelligent company."
"Apart from the inescapable fact that many of the old crowd had left the country for reasons that were often more personal than political, the main difficulty was the curfew."
"I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little."
"And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing."
"Her talent was, how can I put it? inward, sheathed, withdrawn."
"What a relief that must have been. A very Chilean sort of relief."
"She was pleasant and likeable: she was a generous host, nothing was too much trouble when it came to making her guests feel at home."
"We're all writers, and in the end we all have to walk a long and rocky road."
"That is how literature is made in Chile, but not just in Chile, in Argentina and Mexico too, in Guatemala and Uruguay, in Spain and France and Germany, in green England and carefree Italy."
"Am I that wizened youth? Is that the true, the supreme terror, to discover that I am the wizened youth whose cries no one can hear?"