Top 40 Valeria Luiselli Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams – this may be madness.”

— Valeria Luiselli

2. “There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from my different angles, by many different minds.”

— Valeria Luiselli

3. “Euphemisms hide, erase, coat. Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget. Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.”

— Valeria Luiselli

4. “Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of their person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?”

— Valeria Luiselli

5. “Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.”

— Valeria Luiselli

6. “Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.”

— Valeria Luiselli

7. “Numbers and maps tell horror stories, but the stories of deepest horror are perhaps those for which there are no numbers, no maps, no possible accountability, no words ever written or spoken.”

— Valeria Luiselli

8. “La saudade es presencia de una ausencia: una punzada en un miembro fantasma; una grieta en Iztapalapa.”

— Valeria Luiselli

9. “Because – how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.”

— Valeria Luiselli

10. “Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape?”

— Valeria Luiselli

11. “Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.”

— Valeria Luiselli

12. “Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

— Valeria Luiselli

13. “The devastation of the social fabric in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other countries is often thought of as a Central American “gang violence” problem that must be kept on the far side of the border. There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.”

— Valeria Luiselli

14. “Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.”

— Valeria Luiselli

15. “But perhaps a person only has two real residences: the childhood home and the grave.”

— Valeria Luiselli

16. “She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.”

— Valeria Luiselli

17. “The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger.”

— Valeria Luiselli

18. “There’s nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate objects.”

— Valeria Luiselli

19. “Demented is the man who is always clenching his teeth on that solid, immutable block of stone that is the past.”

— Valeria Luiselli

20. “Children force parents to go out looking for a specific pulse, a gaze, a rhythm, the right way of telling the story, knowing that stories don’t fix anything or save anyone but maybe make the world both more complex and more tolerable. And sometimes, just sometimes, more beautiful. Stories are a way of subtracting the future from the past, the only way of finding clarity in hindsight.”

— Valeria Luiselli

21. “I’ve always thought that hell is the people you could one day become. The most frightening ones.”

— Valeria Luiselli

22. “Ever since I was left somewhat alone, without gods, I have been a ferocious believer in the power of small coincidences.”

— Valeria Luiselli

23. “I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude.”

— Valeria Luiselli

24. “The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpretor an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage, the legal system a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail. Stories often become generalized, distorted, appear out of focus.”

— Valeria Luiselli

25. “And perhaps the only way to grant any justice – were that even possible – is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us. Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.”

— Valeria Luiselli

26. “Perhaps the right word is recognition, in the sense of re-cognizing, knowing again, for a second or third time, like an echo of a knowledge, which brings acknowledgment, and possibly forgiveness.”

— Valeria Luiselli

27. “It’s strange how concepts can erode so easily, how words we once used lightly can alchemize abruptly into something toxic.”

— Valeria Luiselli

28. “The end of things, the real end, is never a neat turn of the screw, never a door that is suddenly shut, but more like an atmospheric change, clouds that slowly gather – more a whimper than a bang.”

— Valeria Luiselli

29. “No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a trans national problem that includes the United States – not as a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.”

— Valeria Luiselli

30. “Perhaps no one really knows us who does not know the way we laugh.”

— Valeria Luiselli

31. “Maybe organizing the bookshelves is more effort than it’s worth. True, books look attractive on the shelves and make a space feel inhabited, but when they wake from their vertical slumber, they have lives of their own. Some books even give life to others- like the ones Silvina Ocampo writes about, which when left to their own devices, begin to fornicate and reproduce.”

— Valeria Luiselli

32. “The person who walks too slowly could be plotting a crime or – even worse – might be a tourist.”

— Valeria Luiselli

33. “But this face, my face, like all faces, is not only a collection of traces- it’s also the first draft of a future face... In my young face I instinctively read a first wrinkle of doubt, a first smile of indifference: lines of a story I’ll rewrite and understand on a future reading.”

— Valeria Luiselli

34. “He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, “I think I’ve become a terrible person. In fact, I’ve become a reptile. Do you know that reptiles are stupid because almost their entire brain capacity is used to feel fear?”

— Valeria Luiselli

35. “Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change masks. For one, two, three, six hours, until the world finally falls apart: tomorrow, this Sunday, next Wednesday, Christmas. But in the end, a strange peace, gathered from who knows what rotten gut.”

— Valeria Luiselli

36. “The following day his outline appeared in white chalk on the asphalt. Did the hand of the person who skirted the coastline of his body tremble? The city, its sidewalks: an enormous blackboard- instead of numbers, we add up bodies.”

— Valeria Luiselli

37. “But rereading is not like remembering. It’s more like rewriting ourselves: the subtle alchemy of reinventing our past through the twice-underscored words written by others.”

— Valeria Luiselli

38. “For victims of some crimes, real and horrible crimes, permission to stay in American territory is probably insufficient recompense. But it’s better than nothing. It’s certainly better than the right to a mass grave in Tamaulipas or Veracruz, for instance – the most common “permanent residence” granted to Central American migrants who travel across Mexico.”

— Valeria Luiselli

39. “When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere – in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand.”

— Valeria Luiselli

40. “New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.”

— Valeria Luiselli

41. “Perhaps learning to speak is realizing, little by little, that we can say nothing about anything.”

— Valeria Luiselli

42. “Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you’ll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery.”

— Valeria Luiselli

43. “They weren’t looking for the American Dream, as the narrative usually goes. The children were merely looking for a way out of their daily nightmare.”

— Valeria Luiselli

44. “In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society.”

— Valeria Luiselli

45. “And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”

— Valeria Luiselli

46. “Everyone says they’re empty. Everyone says – vast and flat. Everyone – mesmerizing. Nabokov probably said somewhere – indomitable. But no one had ever told use about the highway storms once you reach the tablelands. You see them from miles away. You fear them, and still you drive straight into them with the dumb tenacity of mosquitoes.”

— Valeria Luiselli

47. “The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.”

— Valeria Luiselli

48. “He spoke slowly, as if searching for adjectives in the darkness.”

— Valeria Luiselli