The Adventures of China Iron
Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Top 10 Best Quotes
“We were nearly in the wetlands where water doubles happiness just as it doubles every image reflected in it, filling each one with plural lives.”
“The smell of near-black tea leaves torn from the green mountains of India that would travel to Britain without losing their moisture, and without losing the sharp perfume born of the tears Buddha shed for the world's suffering, suffering that also travels in tea: we drink green mountains and rain, and we also drink what the Queen drinks. We drink the Queen, we drink work, and we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves, and the broken back of the man carrying them. Thanks to steam power, we no longer drink the lash of the whip on the oarsmen's backs. But we do drink choking coal miners. And that's the way of the world: everything alive lives off the death of someone or something else. Because nothing comes from nothing.”
“Poverty yields cracked skin. It carves and slowly scrapes away at its young, and leaves them to fend for themselves in all weathers.”
“The first price we had to pay for such happiness was the dust. I, having lived wholly inside the dust, having been little more than one of the many forms that dust took there, having been contained in the atmosphere - the earth of the pampa is also sky - started to feel it, to notice it, to hate it when it made my teeth gritty, when it stuck to my sweat, when it weighed down my hat. We declared war on the dust, all the while knowing that we were fighting a losing battle: we come from dust.”
“It's difficult to know what you remember, is it what actually happened? Or is it the story that you've told and re-told and polished like a gemstone over the course of years, like something that has lustre but is as lifeless as a stone?”
“It was the first journey; I knew full well that all journeys come to an end, and maybe this experience of time as finite is what lends light and texture to every living moment, knowing that you have to go back home, that you’re in a foreign land.”
“It was like we were secreting fine threads to make a shell or carapace, woven together like a kind of house made not from spider’s silk, straw, mud or the leathery shell of a crab, but gradually formed from the loops of words and gestures. From Liz’s story and my care for each of our possessions, a space was emerging. One that was ours, with the wagon which went steadily forward, with that empty land which was becoming as flat as it seems to those who have known hills and mountains.”
“It was also a rite of passage, the ditch was almost a branding iron, something to mark the man; from then on a new life had begun. He made them dig a grave for their pasts, a frontier, a before and after.”
“I wish you could see us; but no one will. We know how to leave as if vanishing into thin air: imagine a people that disappears, a people whose colours, houses, dogs, clothes, cows and horses all gradually dissolve like a spectre: their outline turns blurry and insubstantial, the colours fade, and everything melts into the white cloud. And so we go.”
“Home always seems fixed to the ground, even when home is a boat. Or a wagon.”
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Book Keywords:
memory, truth, poverty
