Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman is an American novelist, journalist, and 'maestro', at Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), the journalism school for Latin-America created by Gabriel García Márquez. Goldman is also known as Francisco Goldman Molina, "Frank" and "Paco".
He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Guatemalan mother and Jewish-American father. His first novel, The Long Night of White Chickens (1992), won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and his second, The Ordinary Seaman (1997), was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He currently resides in Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York. He also teaches at Trinity College (Connecticut).
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
“You always felt destined for stardom of one kind or another. But the fear that maybe that wasn't true wouldn't leave you alone. That you were no more than the classes you'd taken, the schools you'd attended, the books you'd read, the languages you spoke, your scholarships, your master's thesis on Borges and the English writers, and so on, but nobody unique, with a talent only your own. You were desperate for something that was yours alone. I was yours alone, but that isn't what you meant.”
“Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that's my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada.”
“ONE AFTERNOON DURING THAT FINAL SPRING, AFTER SHE HAD TURNED THIRTY AURA TURNED TO ME FROM HER DESK WHILE I LAY ON THE BED READING, AND SHE SAID, 'WE HAVE EVERYTHING WE NEED TO BE HAPPY. WE DONT HAVE TO BE RICH. WE CAN GET JOBS IN THE UNIVERSITIES IF WE NEED THEM. WE HAVE OUR BOOKS, OUR READING, OUR WRITING, AND WE HAVE EACH OTHER, FRANK. WE DONT NEED MORE TO BE HAPPY, WE ARE SO LUCKY. DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY WE ARE?”
“Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever.”
“I can go years thinking that it seems impossible that I will ever satisfy that appetite again and then it is easy to satisfy and no one notices or cares, nor does it make me happy, when loneliness surrounds me like water I've already drowned in without dying.”