35 phrases by Mia Couto to learn more about this Mozambican writer

All influences are part of me, which give vent to the word, which builds and invents.

The young man can’t even explain. But it was as if the sea, with its infinities, gave him a relief to get out of that world.

There is only one way to escape from a place: it is to get out of ourselves. There is only one way to get out of ourselves: it is to love someone.

Childhood is seeing the world as something that is not finished. That adult who is not surprised by anything, I’m sorry to say, but he’s dead.

One would have to wait centuries for each man to be seen without the weight of his race.

The secret is to delay suffering, to cook it in a very slow fire, until it spreads, diluted, in the infinity of time.

We are wood that got rained. Now we don’t light or shade. We have to dry in the light of a sun that still exists. And that sun can only rise within us.

The eyelids clean the eyes of dust. What eyelids cleanse the dust from the heart?

We carry our past like a disease and our present seems to be connected with a cult of speed, which doesn’t make us reflect on what we are.

What hurts in death is falsehood. Death only exists for a very brief exchange of absences. In another being, the dead will be reborn. Our pain is that we don’t know how to be immortal.

If you want to know a person, listen to their eyes.

The dream is the eye of life.

Many people travel by plane, but when they travel it feels like they are in a cage. Traveling is getting out of ourselves.

Each discovers his angel having an affair with the devil.

What can’t bloom at the right time ends up exploding later.

The more uninhabitable, the more the world becomes populated.

Because inside me, I’m not alone. I am many. And these all dispute my only life.

There is no room inside of us to bury our little deaths.

Dreams are letters we send to our other, remaining lives.

Living is easy: even the dead can do it. But life is a weight that must be carried by all living beings.

There were two ways to leave: one was to leave, the other was to go crazy.

Paradise is not a place, it is a brief moment that we conquer.

In war, the poor are killed. In peace, the poor die.

Because I have always walked on my feet, and sometimes I give myself to live.

Who is rocking: is it me, is it the chair or is it the world?

Don’t you see the rivers that never fill the sea? The life of each one is also like this: there is always everything to live.

Longing is waiting for the flour to be remolded into grain.

Men are like that, pretending to be strong, because they are afraid.

Everyone praises the dream, which is the compensation of life. But it’s the other way around, Doctor. We need to live to rest from dreams.

We don’t go to heaven. It is the opposite: the sky is what enters us, into our lungs. The person dies and is choked in a cloud.

Not living is what tires you the most.

Whoever lived nailed to one floor doesn’t know how to dream of other places.

Life, for him, was a well-behaved river. Happiness was the harbinger of the flood.

Thousands of Mozambicans died, we never saw you here. Now, five foreigners disappear and it’s already the end of the world?

We had not understood war, now we did not understand peace.