“Our penultimate lot, ladies and gentlemen, exudes an air of mystical melancholy. The tooth itself is crocodilian, but its aura is almost angelic. Note the curve; it is like a wing in ascent. Its owner, Mr. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
“Some compare La Bestia to a demon, others to a kind of vacuum that sucks distracted riders down into its metal entrails. And when… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
“He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, “I think I’ve become a terrible person. In fact, I’ve become… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
I learned to keep at a certain distance from things - and to make myself a little bit invisible while I observed and understood… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
“Writer and former Border Patrol officer Francisco Cantú has written poignantly about these death maps and all the “clearly marked ghosts” that dot the… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
“Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share
Writers tend to think they occupy a much more relevant place in society than we actually do. But we really are closer to buffoons… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
“Everyone says they're empty. Everyone says – vast and flat. Everyone – mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere – indomitable. But no one had ever… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
I like reading the world through a writer's eyes, rather than seeing a writer looking at him or herself as if at the center… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
“I know I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page,… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it's said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges;… — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share
“Perhaps it's right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable.” — Valeria Luiselli Copy Share Image
