The poet, distracted by politics, asks of poetry that it make itself useful like metal or flour, that it get ready to stain its face with coal dust and fight body to body.
I like Messi because he doesn’t think he is Messi.
Charity, vertical, humiliates. Solidarity, horizontal, helps.
The wages Haiti requires by law belong in the department of science fiction: actual wages on coffee plantations vary from $.07 to $.15 a day.
We Latins are known for jabbering on.
This work is a torture on the rump but a joy to the heart.
Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.
We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We, the living are askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people.
The more freedom is extended to business, the more prisons have to be built for those who suffer from that business.
I’m attracted to soccer’s capacity for beauty. When well played, the game is a dance with a ball.
Memory. My poison, my food.
The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.
I am quite prehistoric, absolutely prehistoric.
A pretty move, for the love of God.
I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past.
Soccer, metaphor for war, at times turns into real war.
No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.
If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?
Development develops inequality.
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret: every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.