Eva Baltasar > Quotes

“Small children have the power to impose their happiness on the everyday anxieties of grown ups”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Language is and always will be an occupied territory. I have the feeling I was shackled to it the moment I was born. Only language can help you belong somewhere and make sure you don’t lose your way.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“She tells me to take some time off and settle into the new place. 'Do your own thing. Time off.' Language is and always will be an occupied territory. I have the feeling I was shackled to it the moment I was born. Only language can help you belong somewhere and make sure you don't lose your way. It's a nourishing underlayer that seems to live in the mind, migrate down to the mouth, and, spoken, melt on the lips. At the same time, language is everywhere, occupying the body's farthest-flung cells, pushing them to unimaginable places. It urges you on and turns your stomach, confuses your animal instincts, makes you human. No emotion is more indulgent than the feeling that you are intensely human. Though it can also be the most tyrannical. You are responsible for every word, and no statement is innocent.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I can give anything up, because nothing is essential when you refuse to imprison life in a narrative.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I needed to face the emptiness, an emptiness I had dreamed of so often I’d turned it into a mast, a center of gravity to hold onto when life fell to pieces around me.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Healthy things kill you much more slowly. They begin by convincing you of their love and making you bow to their withering intensity.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permagel

“I listen with all five senses, I listen to her with my entire body, with everything but my heart, which feels like it wants to thrash the hell out of me. This wasn't part of our plan. The truth is we'd never made any plans, we'd just taken huge bites out of life.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“she has an appointment in fifteen days for another set of tests. She doesn't eat for several hours before leaving the house. Then they draw her blood again. Blood, the snitch everyone hates. It keeps you alive on one condition: transparency. It creeps around the body like a shrewd domestic who has access to every room and knows everything there is to know about you. And who talks under pressure. The body is too basic, too weak; it can't be trusted. Only the mind can console us for its disloyalty; the only flag it flies is that of freedom, made of the bones of truth and the bones of lies - a cross; white against black. Blood respects nothing.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“But all this tunneling has opened rifts through which the captive parts of me have started to emerge. I realize that I am smoke, that the things that define me rise as they would up a chimney, probing every crack, searching for a wellspring of light or cold, a cupola of sky to sprawl into.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I’d chosen Brussels because a city whose symbol is a little boy pissing was a city I knew I would like.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permagel

“I think I’ve discovered what happiness is: whistling the moment you wake up, not getting in anyone’s way, owing no explanations, and falling into bed at daybreak, body addled from exhaustion and mind free of every last trace of bitterness and dust.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“The destination always kills the journey, and if we have to reduce life to a story, it can only be a bad one”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Sometimes, Samsa’s make me wonder if I’ve made a mistake loving her with such ease. But it means everything to hold her in my arms, her body steadfast to mine, happiness flowing from her limbs like the vigorous power of a god, knowing without a doubt that this is my all.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“The power of fear is in the sum of every small dream reduced to dust.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permafrost

“El bosc. La primera vegada que vaig anar-hi vaig sentir-me amenaçada. Encara que el camí entre l'alberg i el bosc discorre entre vegetació, és fàcil saber quan he arribat pròpiament al bosc. És quan començo a notar que els arbres parlen de mi entre ells amb un llenguatge que se m'escapa.”
― Eva Baltasar, Mamut

“Y sin embargo he descubierto que no se puede columpiar a un hijo sin sonreír. Lo he intentado y es imposible. Los niños pequeños tienen ese poder, imponen su alegría al malestar ordinario de los adultos.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Sorrow holds me because it has tentacles; I am its sustenance, it stores me. I need to get out of here.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Alcohol is the friend that knows you have nothing to lose, holds you tight, and makes you feel like it's giving you everything.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“It seems unbelievable that a single decision, a fucking intangible thought, could so violently upset the flesh-and-bone scaffolding of daily life, the steady rhythm of the hours, the predictable, material color of the landscapes that give us nourishment and company.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“The truth is we'd ever made any plans, we'd just taken huge bites out of life.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“Like illness, celibacy makes us more human”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“But I'm alone: I am fifty-two kilos of loneliness and lamentation, a real treasure.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permafrost

“Que el sueño lo curta mientras la consciencia descansa. Que a todas horas esté despierto en mí el celo que hace productivo el cuerpo y clara la consciencia. El celo es voluntad y quiere creer. La voluntad es el gran músculo, más obstinado que el corazón, más resistente que el corazón.”
― Eva Baltasar, Ocaso y fascinación

“Do you remember that movie we saw when we were little?” I begin. “The Great Escape—we watched it with Dad at least seven or eight times. It was about these American pilots in a German POW camp who dig this long, long tunnel that runs the length of the compound. But, on the night of the escape, when they reach the end of the tunnel, they realize they’re six meters short of the forest. Their calculations had been off by six meters! They’ve got no choice but to risk their necks and make a run for it, in plain view of the guards. Do you remember?” “No,” she says indifferently.
“Whatever. What I’m trying to say is: Being with a woman is like sticking your head out of the tunnel and discovering that you’ve actually dug through those last few meters.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permagel

“Medicación, medicación y medicación. Un suicida con éxito es hoy un héroe. El mundo está lleno de desaprensivos titulados en primeros auxilios, se hallan por doquier, discretos y grises como palomas, agresivos como madres. Desafían la muerte ajena con masajes cardíacos y precisas maniobras de Heimlich.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permagel

“I realize that I am smoke, that the things that define me rise as they would up a chimney, probing every crack, searching for a wellspring of light or cold... I don't mean my personality. Personality is a dress made of scraps that I never stop washing or mending; it clothes me, might even suit me, but it will never, ever define me. The nakedness I conceal is what makes me a person.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I wander through the museums like a drifter down affluent avenues, the value of the pieces on show beyond my comprehension, their beauty out of my reach.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“I've realised that I know myself by heart - I know myself to the point of recognising people who don't exist and yet complement me. I know myself like a path that leads home, like a doorless corridor, like endless guardrails. I know myself like a decade-long involuntary commitment. To end and be done with it. I sense a change in my body-it is unsexed, majestic and magnificently afflicted, like a tower riddled with sorrow. And I can feel the whole crush of humanity inside me, concentrated in a place that is absolutely personal.”
― Eva Baltasar, Permafrost

“La vida puede no gustarte pero ser inocua como el cloro que tragas con el agua.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder

“What was I thinking, dropping everything? The devastating possibility of the same old job, of a tiny room in a suburban apartment, of lovers as fleeting as shooting stars, hot to the touch one day, a distant dream the next.”
― Eva Baltasar, Boulder