Everything in the universe is connected. Forget about distances, about time, and realize that everything takes place in an unending present, in this very forest, in your memory, in your heart.
Victor’s nephew was plump and bald: all babies that age looked like Winston Churchill to him.
You get three Venezuelans together and one will play the drums or the guitar and the other two will dance; there is no ill that can resist that treatment. Our parties, in contrast, seem like funerals: the men gather in a corner to talk business and the women die of boredom. Only the young dance, seduced by North American music, but as soon as they marry they turn solemn like their parents.
Se necesita amor para seguir viviendo.
I think of my destiny as an expatriate. It is my fate to wander from place to place, and to adapt to new soils. I believe I will be able to do that because handfuls of Chilean soil are caught in my roots; I carry them with me always.
Imi plac tesaturile, culorile, machiajul si rutina de a ma aranja in fiecare dimineata, cu toate ca majoritatea timpului il petrec inchisa in mansarda si scriind. “Nu ma vede nimeni, dar ma vad eu” spunea filozofic maica-mea, si nu se referea doar la aspectul fizic, ci si la trasaturile profunde de caracter si comportament.
The author Eduardo Galeano said that “in the end, women’s fear of men’s violence is a reflection of men’s fear of women without fear.
Enough of euphemisms. Enough of partial solutions. Profound changes are needed in society and it’s us, women, who can impose them. Remember that no one gives us anything. We have to seize what we want. We need to create global awareness and get organized. Now, more than ever before, this is possible because we have information, communication, and the ability to mobilize.
Almost all the most important people in the country took turns living there, or at least attending the spiritualist meetings, the cultural discussions, and the social gatherings. Among them was the Poet – years later considered the greatest of the century and translated into all the known languages on earth – on whose knees Alba often sat, little suspecting that one day she would walk behind his casket, with a bunch of bloody carnations in her hand, between two rows of machine guns. Clara.
Despite being English, they served an edible meal.
Jaime was convinced that after so many years of struggle the Socialists were finally going to win. This he attributed to the fact that the people had become conscious of their needs and their own strength.
We are very self-centered: the rest of the universe exists only to consume our wines and produce soccer teams we can beat.
How long does a man spend dying? What does it mean to say “for ever”? Pablo Neruda.
To see my country with the heart, one must read Pablo Neruda, the national poet who in his verses immortalized the imposing landscapes, the aromas and dawns, the tenacious rain and dignified poverty, the stoicism and the hospitality, of Chile. That is the land of my nostalgia, the one I invoke in my solitude, the one that appears as a backdrop in so many of my stories, the one that comes to me in my dreams.
I related my impressions of La Paz, its purple mountains, its hermetic Indians, and its air, so thin that your lungs are always on the verge of filling with foam and your mind with hallucinations.
During the war the Chilean Nazi Party paraded with brown uniforms, flags bearing swastikas, and arms raised in a Nazi salute. My grandmother ran alongside, throwing tomatoes at them. This woman was an exception because in Chile people were so anti-Semitic that the word Jew was a dirty word, and I have friends who had their mouths washed out with soap for having dared say it.
There still exists today a mysterious colony out in the countryside called Dignidad, a Nazi camp that is completely out of bounds, as if it were an independent nation; no government has been able to dismantle it because it is believed that it has the covert protection of the armed forces.
We Chileans like the Germans for their sausage, their beer, and their Prussian helmets, as well as the goose step our military adopted for parades, but in practice we try to emulate the English. We admire them so much that we think we’re the English of Latin America, just as we believe that the English are the Chileans of Europe.
It isn’t for nothing that our motto is “By Right or by Force,” a phrase that has always seemed particularly stupid to me.
The technique of “disappearing” ideological enemies, which several Latin American dictatorships were so strongly committed to during the seventies and eighties, had been practiced in Chile nearly a century earlier. None of which takes away from the fact that our democracy was the most solid, and the oldest, on the continent.