The Private Lives of Trees
Alejandro Zambra
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There are some families in which, at 9:00 at night, the father starts to hit the wine and the mother the ironing, far away from the fate of the children, who play in the yard, pretending to be hurt, or in the rooms in the dark, or in the bathroom making soap bubbles, or in the kitchen making odd deserts out of sour milk...There are also families that remember their dead at this hour, an aura of sorrow dominating their faces. No one plays, no one talks: the adults write letters that no one will read, the children ask questions that no one will answer.”
“It would be better to close the book, close the books, and to face, all at once, not life, which is very big, but the fragile armor of the present.”
“He wanted to put his memories into a bag and carry them until the weight destroyed his back.”
“Perhaps he has always limited himself to following images: he hasn't made decisions, hasn't won or lost, he has just let himself be drawn in by certain images, and he followed them, without fear or courage, until he got close to them or shut them out.”
“Julián didn’t want to regain his love, since he had stopped loving her a long time ago. He had stopped loving her one second before he began loving her. It sounds strange, but that’s how he feels: instead of loving Karla, he had loved the possibility of love, and then the imminence of love. He had loved the idea of a form moving beneath dirty white sheets.”
“...she feels a desire to go to the bridge, alone, to throw something over the rail, into the current—a photograph, a hat, anything; she thinks of the pure pleasure of seeing the object lost in the flow, and maybe she thinks, as well, of closing a circle, though she doesn't believe in that myth of closing circles, of the culmination of a process. She believes, instead, that processes don't exist, that the circles we are capable of seeing are never the right ones.”
“The truth is she can’t stand fiction; she gets impatient with novelists’ absurd farces; let’s pretend there was once a world that was more or less like this, let’s pretend that I’m not me, that I’m a reliable voice, a white face over which less-white faces, semi-dark faces pass.”
“She knows that very soon Ernesto won't come back. She imagines herself disconcerted, then furious, and finally invaded by a decisive calm. It's all right, there was no commitment, as it should be: one loves in order to stop loving, and one stops loving in order to start loving others, or to end up alone, for a while or forever. That is the law. The only law.”
“Julian curses his fixation: Ultimately, he should have his time writing down the conversations that floated up from the bar beneath the apartment he shared with Karla. That would have been much better. Instead of spotlighting a dead image, he should write about lives like that boy’s in 1984. Instead of making literature, he should have lost himself among familiar mirrors. He imagines a novel with only two chapters: the first, very short, records what the boy knew at the time; the second, very long, practically infinite, relates what the boy didn’t know. It’s not that he wants to write that story. It isn’t a future project. It’s more like he wishes he had written it years ago and could read it now.”
“It would be better to close the book, close the books, and to face, all at once, not life, which is very big, but the fragile armor of the present. For now, the story goes on and Verónica hasn’t arrived; it’s best to keep that in view, repeat it a thousand and one times: when she comes home, the novel ends—the book continues until she comes home or until Julián is sure that she is not coming home again.”
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