Quotes from Juan Gabriel Vásquez

There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn't miss an appointment, it never has.

Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.

The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.

Now that so many years have passed, now that I remember with the benefit of an understanding I didn't then have, I think of that conversation and it seems implausible that its importance didn't hit me in the face. (And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read).

In the darkness of the bedroom I thought of that, although thinking in the darkness is not advisable: things seem bigger or more serious in the darkness, illnesses more destructive, the presence of evil closer, indifference more intense, solitude more profound.

Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.

A person is from wherever they feel best, and roots are for plants. Everyone knows that, don't they?

So you fell out of the sky, too? the Little Prince asked the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I'd fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde's fall, human lives don't have these technological luxuries to fall back on.

the nostalgia for things that weren't yet lost.

they talked of intentions and projects, convinced, as only new lovers can be, that saying what you wanted was the same as saying who you are.

People are the same all over the world, I imagine, people who react like that to their countries conspiracies: turning them into tales that are told, like children's fables, and also into place in the memory or the imagination, a place where we go as tourists, to revive nostalgia or to try to find something we've lost.

the kind of sadness we tolerate because it appears at happy moments

her face was like a party that everyone had left.

Childhood doesn't exist for children; however, for adults childhood is that former country we lost one day and which we futilely seek to recover by inhabiting it with diffuse or nonexistent memories, which in general are nothing but shadows of other dreams.

No hay manía más funesta, ni capricho más peligroso, que la especulación o la conjetura sobre los caminos que no tomamos.

I was also surprised by the alacrity and dedication we devote to the damaging exercise of remembering, which after all brings nothing good and serves only to hinder our normal functioning, like those bags of sand athletes tie around their calves for training.

Lo importante en nuestra sociedad no es lo que pasa, sino quién cuenta lo que pasa.

The I realized no one wants to hear heroic stories, but everyone likes to be told about someone else's misery.

The city was poisoned with the venom of small fundamentalisms, and the venom ran beneath us, like dirty water in the sewers.

La edad adulta trae consigo la ilusión perniciosa del control, y acaso dependa de ella. Quiero decir que es ese espejismo de dominio sobre nuestra propia vida lo que nos permite sentirnos adultos, pues asociamos la adultez con la autonomía, el soberano derecho a determinar lo que va a sucedernos enseguida. El desengaño viene más pronto o más tarde, pero viene siempre, no falta a la cita, nunca lo ha hecho.

And I tell myself at the same time that we're terrible judges of the present moment, maybe because the present doesn't actually exist: all is memory, this sentence that I just wrote is already a memory, this word is a memory that you, reader, just read.

Y me digo al mismo tiempo que somos pésimos jueces del momento presente, tal vez porque el presente no existe en realidad: todo es recuerdo, esta frase que acabo de escribir ya es recuerdo, es recuerdo esta palabra que usted, lector, acaba de leer.)

La experiencia, eso que llamamos experiencia, no es el inventario de nuestros dolores, sino la simpatía aprendida hacia los dolores ajenos.