People do not belong to others, either. How can the huincas buy and sell people if they do not own them. Sometimes the boy went two or three days without speaking a word, surly, and not eating, and when asked what was the matter, the answer was always the same: “There are content days and there are sad days. Each person is a master of his silence.
La vejez es el mejor momento para ser y hacer lo que a uno le place.
All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.
Childhood is a naturally unhappy period of our existence, Lillian. It was Walt Disney who invented the notion that it has to be happy, simply to make money.
She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer.
I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously... That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension.
The only cure for so much misfortune is love. It’s not the force of gravity that keeps the universe in balance, but the binding power of love.
How exuberant and boisterous the universe is, Alma! It turns and turns, and the only constant is everything changes. It is a mystery we can only appreciate out of stillness. I’m living through a very interesting stage. My spirit contemplates the changes in my body with fascination, but this contemplation is not from a distance, but from within. My spirit and my body are together in this process.
Life is long, and the world is large. It is all a question of taking a chance.
We have to defend democracy, but remember that not everything is politics. Without science, industry, and technology, no progress is possible, and without music and art, there’s no soul.
That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep.
Very few old folk are happy, Irina. Most of them are poor, aren’t healthy, and have no family. It’s the most fragile and difficult stage of life, more so than childhood, because it grows worse day by day, and there is no future other than death.
Those native peoples were confounded by the mystery of the crucified man the whites worshipped, and they could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.
Although stunned and hungry, many sang, because it would have been pointless to aggravate misfortune by complaining.
The lack of a father leaves a hole in a woman’s heart, Lucia. A girl needs to feel she is protected; she needs masculine energy to develop trust in men and later to be able to give herself in love.
Intimacy needs time to mature – a shared history, tears shed, obstacles overcome, photographs in an album. It’s a slow-growing plant.
I tried and tried to sleep, lulled by the movement, the purring of the motor, and the snores of the other passengers, but it’s never been easy for me to sleep, and much less now, when I still have residues of the wild life running through my veins.
Igual que en el momento de venir al mundo, al morir tenemos miedo de lo desconocido. Pero el miedo es algo interior que no tiene nada que ver con la realidad.
Mi vida se hace al contarla y mi memoria se fija con la escritura; lo que no pongo en palabras sobre papel, lo borra el tiempo.
I was terrified of being dependent too, Alma,” Dr. Catherine Hope told her one day. “But I’ve realized it’s not such a big deal. You get used to it, and are grateful for the assistance. I can’t dress or take a shower on my own, I have problems brushing my teeth and cutting the chicken on my plate, but I’ve never been more contented than I am now.