“I loved the exuberance of the place. A sense of liberation and love of life penetrated every room. His home was like his poetry, full of hints of fantasy, allegory and hedonism. Neruda's presence was everywhere writ large on the house. He had build it, seemingly haphazardly without any architect's plans or permission from authority. In a sense, the house had the same structure as a poem on first reading - awkward and confused. Yet wandering through it was like wandering through his poems. Suddenly everything fell in to place. A romantic avant-garde poet could not have lived anywhere else.”

“The accepted view appears to be that Neruda represent the real Chile: a place of poetry, freedom of spirit and international enterprise.”

“A statue of Arturo Prat, hero of the Chilean Navy, surveyed it all. From under his statue I look up onto those fragrant wooded hills. The shanty houses blur into a pastiche of colour, yellows and reds, cobalt and purple. The washing lines strung across the stairways and hung from balconies echo the ships' flags fluttering in the harbour.This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists' enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be explored, and I dream it still.”

“I have that feeling, which I have had often in Chile, that while human beings can make efforts to control, tame and use this place, clearing forests, marking boundaries, their influence here is only transitory.”

“Once again Chile reduces us to what R. L. Stevenson called 'the virginity of senses' where words cannot match the impressions received.”

“Power loves not the light of day, nor the attention of curious eyes. In darkness it thrives most...A lord may send his army hither and thither, but the true testing of his power is in those places where his army is not...Has he sent its long fingers far enough through the backstreets and alleys, into the drinking dens and the lending-houses, so that he may gather them unto himself and hold them firm without a single swordsman?”

“Ben remembered reading about curators in "Wonderstruck", and thought about what id meant to curate your own life, as his dad had done here. What would it be like to pick and choose the objects and stories that would go in your own cabinet? How would Ben curate his own life? And then, thinking about his museum box, and his house, and his books, and the secret room, he realized he'd already begun doing it. Maybe, thought Ben, we are all cabinets of wonders.”