“This story befuddles expectations and foils them.”—Ariel Dorfman

I think that this compulsion of mine influenced my choice of career.

A salad can be an anthem to joy

Illustrious tyranny of the peach:

Through the crack, you could see the smiling face of a gray-haired woman.

Time is so complicated, yet so simple!

The island lights look like the stars came down from the sky and queued up.

Fire? / No: light.

Look: it happened here. A sense of surfeit grew / from the unfeeling past-

Public square. Guard in love with Magnolia (secretly, even to himself).

Like a goat, Lieutenant, like a tulip. I smell like whatever you want me to, Sir.

The most casual observation would seem to suggest, beyond a doubt, that the basilisk species is on its way to extinction.

He was not above melodrama. He would cry at westerns and gangster films.

They saw wounds bleeding into the mud, / they died among flowers, in puddles,

Then I listened to the trial on the radio, like everyone else here, but it was different for me because it was personal.

At first we feel hatred toward other tourists—but eventually we begin to hate the tourist in us.

She was terrified by His Holiness's utter silence.

The Hooligan flung himself against a tree and lay in wait in a hollow, and the rat flung itself against a log and lay in wait in the log.

Even so, there it was: so beautiful in its invincible fragility, tense and slender, bathing the ancient glow of navigation and adventure.

I buried her standing, like Facundo, because she had balls!

The woman's name was Angelita and she was not willing to be taken to live in Trenque-Lauquen.

Guadalupe passed before me and her perfume swept my face like a scarf.

If he makes a move, I won't discourage him. Maybe he'll say something interesting.

In a land where there's no need to abandon one's home in order to lose the roof over one's head, everyone is on the road.

She understood that the key to building herself a future was to decipher, not to decide.

We need a beer, he said, to recover from the shock.

Out of that incurable sorrow was born the strange melody called the tango.

The noise of the city was reduced to a murmur, and in the distance they could glimpse the sea and ships, a nebulous promise each of them interpreted as they saw fit.

“Literary fanaticism, in any of its forms, whether from the point of view of master or disciple, has always been incompatible with the intelligence and free spirit of Saer.”—José Saramago