Quotes from Carmen Boullosa

Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.

The name Cleopatra wakens the world to life.

I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.

Some people die, others just run out of fuel.

I drink the darkness of disbelief.

Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.

I was an angel of the desert. In your arms I broke my wings.

Women are allowed to enter the spaces of the senses, the space of the body, the spaces opened by sensations, all kinds of feelings, but women are not allowed to enter the spaces of reason to the same extent, that is to say the space of ideas, political ideas.

Within all things, all living beings, the words of the gods lie hidden, awaiting revelation.

I am filled with the thirst of the desert.

Everybody can tell a story but it is different to create a real book, a real literary text that has several voices in itself and that breathes with its own mouth and has its own lungs and looks toward its own body. To create that body you have to start out with a stone and stones do not have lungs or air in themselves.

No fate is worse than oblivion; it is the completest form of death that can befall a queen.

Nothing lasts for those who are born to die, Both fortune and misfortune hurry by.

For a pair of eyes and a pair of ears to fix images and sounds in the temporal order in which they happen is no easy task; their memory enjoys making fun of the tyranny of time.

The name Cleopatra wakens the world to life.

Pinchando insectos, sosteníamos al orden civil, defendíamos las leyes y las costumbres. No era crueldad: era civilidad.

Los dos no-cadáveres de mi mamá y María José mi hermana están en la zona de confusión que media entre la vida y la muerte.

Aprendía mal y a medias una lección: la gente se moría. Al morir, ¿dónde quedaba?, ¿eran ya para siempre inaccesibles? Transitaba como la cabeza de la tortuga, de la vida a la muerte, preguntándome dónde estaba la línea segura. Y no veía bien a bien dónde pararme para saber que estaba en territorio firme. Sobre todo porque comenzaba una exploración que ponía en juego la apariencia de los vivos.

The young Efrainite poets got around the city on foot, or by bus ...Some of the Efrainites were belligerent and used to turn up at literary events to jeer, pass judgment ...

En nuestra región llovía todos los años, abundante, ruidosa, exageradamente, y el clima era siempre para nosotros benignidad y opulencia. Éramos pueblos de lluvia, acostumbrados a las inundaciones y los excesos de agua. Nuestros ancestros habían perdido las escamas sin abandonar el alma de peces.

Por mi parte, quería ahora ver cómo era el mundo donde la razón y las leyes de la física obligaban a un orden riguroso e inevitable, donde fabular no era una necesidad sino un oficio de pocos, abocados a examinar con pausa el rigor de los afectos y del mundo.