Liv

“The glow of happiness and
satisfaction surrounding her at that
moment could have lit up Manhattan.”
― Liv Constantine, The Last Mrs. Parrish

“He had been a reader of imperturbable voracity during the respites after battles and the rests after love, but a reader without order or method. He read at any hour, in whatever light was available, sometimes strolling under the trees, sometimes on horseback under the equatorial sun, sometimes in dim coaches rattling over cobbled pavements, sometimes swaying in the hammock as he dictated a letter. A bookseller in Lima had been surprised at the abundance and variety
of works he selected from a general catalogue that listed everything from Greek philosophers to a treatise on chiromancy. In his youth he read the Romantics under the influence of his tutor, Simón Rodríguez, and he continued to devour them as if he were reading himself and his own idealistic, intense temperament. They were impassioned readings that marked him for the rest of his life. In the end he read everything that came his way, and he did not have a favorite author but rather many who had been favorites at different times. The bookcases in the various houses he lived in were always crammed full, and the bedrooms and hallways were turned into narrow passes between steep cliffs of books and mountains of errant documents that proliferated as he passed and pursued him without mercy in their quest for archival peace. He never was able to read all the books he owned. When he moved to another city he left them in the care of his most trustworthy friends, although he never heard anything about them again, and his life of fighting obliged him to leave behind a trail of books and papers stretching over four hundred leagues from Bolivia to Venezuela.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, The General in His Labyrinth

“No matter what, I have to connect with the past so that I can make a new future.”
― Liv Constantine, The Stranger in the Mirror

“Growing up dirt-poor, with everyone looking down on me, I learned early on that if you want something, you have to get it for yourself. No one’s going to just hand it over.”
― Liv Constantine, The Last Mrs. Parrish