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Book: Lost Children Archive
Quotes of Book: Lost Children Archive

Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
He said he was interested in Chief Cochise, Geronimo, and the Chiricahuas, because they'd been the last Apache leaders-moral, political, military-of the last free peoples on the American continent, the last to surrender.
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
But I suppose it's always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic and military powers. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but a little bit frightened. None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don't know which is worse.
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man's-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world's economic and military powers.
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
Euphemisms hide, erase, coat. Euphemisms lead us to tolerate the unacceptable. And, eventually, to forget. Against a euphemism, remembrance. In order to not repeat.
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
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.
book-quote storms
Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside of What would happen then? I wonder what my sister, who understand books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She's so good at explaining books and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she'd say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children – books like that short story by García Márquez, "Light is Like Water," and of course – are nothing but desperate attempts by adults to come to terms with childhood. That although they may seem to be stories about children's worlds – worlds without adults – they are in fact stories about children's worlds – worlds without adults – they are in fact stores about an adult's world when there are children in it, about the way that children's imaginations destabilize our adult sense of reality and force us to question the very grounds of that reality. The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected by other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.
book-quote imagination children reality
Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
Mouths open to the sun, they sleep.
book-quote opening-lines
Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
I also knew you wouldn't remember this trip, because you're only five years old, and our pediatrician had told us that children don't starting building memories of things until after they turn six. When I realized that, that I was ten and you were only five, I thought, fuck. But of course I didn't say so out loud. I just thought, fuck, silently, to myself. I realized that I'd remember everything and you maybe wouldn't remember anything. I needed to find a way to help you remember, even if it was only through things I documented for you, for the future. And that's how I became a documentarist and a documentarian at the same time. {p 213}
book-quote memory documentary
Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word.
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person's absence.
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?
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Valeria Luiselli _ Lost Children Archive
I suddenly realized he probably didn't know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard."
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