The night they drove old dixie down...

If you wish to go to extremes, let it be in sweetness, patience, humility and charity.

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

Not everything is supposed to become something beautiful and long-lasting. Sometimes people come into your life to show you what is right and what is wrong, to show you who you can be, to teach you to love yourself, to make you feel better for a little while, or to just be someone to walk with at night and spill your life to. Not everyone is going to stay forever, and we still have to keep on going and thank them for what they’ve given us.

One day, the apolitical intellectuals of my country will be interrogated by the humblest of our people. They will be asked what they did when their country was slowly dying out, like a sweet campfire, small and abandoned. No one will ask them about their dress or their long siestas after lunch, or about their futile struggles against “nothingness,” or about their ontological way to make money, No, they won’t be questioned on Greek mythology, or about the self-disgust they felt when someone deep inside them was getting ready to die the coward’s death. They will be asked nothing about their absurd justifications nurtured in the shadow of a huge lie. On that day, the humble people will come, those who never had a place in the books and poems of the apolitical intellectuals but who daily delivered their bread and milk, their eggs and tortillas; those who mended their clothes, those who drove their cars, those who took care of their dogs and gardens, and worked for them, and they will ask: “What did you do when the poor suffered, when tenderness and life were dangerously burning out in them?” Apolitical intellectuals of my sweet country, you will have nothing to say. A vulture of silence will eat your gut. Your own misery will gnaw at your souls. And you will be mute in your shame.

“We need women who are so strong they can be gentle, so educated they can be humble, so fierce they can be compassionate, so passionate they can be rational, and so disciplined they can be free.”