You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.

One should read Borges more.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.