If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.
I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.
If I don’t say the thought right I might destroy it.
Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.
Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement.
I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was the saddest ghost in the house.
We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven’t begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from ourselves.
What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?
Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.
He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence.
A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.
It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love.
When we have made an experience or a chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos.
But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.
We must take an interest in politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice.
Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.
TWars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.
There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering.
Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives.
After a while, when nothing happened, when no reprisals fell on us, it seemed that nothing significant had happened. Some of us began to distrust our memories. We began to think that we had collectively dreamt up the fevers of that night. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time. Meanwhile, the river of wild jaguars flowed below the surface of our hungry roads.