My Favourate Top 50 Quotations from Llama Confessions

  • Poverty retards and undermines people’s capacity to think, to learn and to grow. The scourge of poverty works against the rights of the poor and their dignity.
  • Sunlight has become comparable to truthfulness and faithfulness. Many people are sincere, but less faithful, at least to themselves.
  • In life, three types of hunger exist: sexual hunger, physical hunger and emotional hunger.
  • The beasts, lights, silence, burden, seduction, dead music, ambience, fragrance, and sensuality were all the perfect ingredients of the Lola magic.
  • Jazz and rock seem geometrically, musically and worldly apart, but soulfully and spiritually connected. Their sounds manifest and vibrate energy.”
  • Life without love is just like a day without light, a night without stars.
  • A soul mate is a temporary feeling, a state of mind. You fall in love today and the following day out of love. This pendulum swing of feelings is just like change of season… winter and summer, spring and autumn. As the season changes, so does the soul. As the soul changes, so does the mate.
  • The boat was our spiritual pivotal point, a true universe of the lake, revealing itself to unsuspecting tourists. A noisy engine and the totora reeds were a reminder of how complex and interwoven life can become. The noises people hear when they first fall in love.
  • Melting ice of the Andean glacier has become the major source of water supply. A clear sign that Pachamama is listening to the plight of ordinary people.
  • These boys needed a role model, love, hope, food, and shelter, not just food and cash.
  • Psychiatrists see an illness, and not a person. They treat an illness, and not a patient.
  • Mental illness is not a curse, but a gift from God.
  •  Llamas provide them with a sense of security, wealth, and pride. They symbolise success and prestige in the community.
  • Diplomatic rationality was replaced by mental anguish, in the company of people of a lesser God.
  • Jesus entered Jerusalem dramatically and triumphantly, riding a borrowed donkey.
  • Madness and its forces of darkness have led to a wedge between psychiatry and us;
  • Without crazy people, there is no market for psychiatrists and psychologists. Without worshippers, priests will cease going to a synagogue
  •  The people, the natural and physical environments of old white colonial buildings of Sucre and the snow-white Mount Illimani, are driving me to belief that God is somewhere.
  • Today, coupled with magic, love, art and science, religion has become transformed into an all-powerful institution
  •  Psychiatrists too practise magic. The shamans too have healing powers. They can cast the spells. Holy sex workers practice magic with their clients. Happiness is magic. There is magic in the Amazon jungle, the bushveld, in the mining tunnels. The silver from Potosi created magic for Spanish alchemists. Everything we touch, everywhere we move, magic, like air, is in abundance. The healing powers of magic are with us all the time.
  •  Those who are fortunate to realise it will tap into it and use it for their advantage. Those who are not familiar with the magic they have, will forever seek to make sense of life. They will never be happy, for happiness is just a state of mind. You can create and recreate it. Like air, the formula is free to anyone.
  • When mental illness strikes, we resort to the discourse. But when it subsides, we resort to stigma.
  • Her exquisite beauty and my career as a diplomat made me understand how things in life influence each other. This means that everything ends in time, so that it can be replaced by its opposite
  •  The jungle will make me see things in an extraordinary light than the darkness I’ve been through recently
  •  I became a diplomat because diplomats are God’s messengers. They are God’s eyes and ears.
  • Many of us expect things to always be the same and when things do not correspond to what we wish, we cannot adjust ourselves to what life brings. Our inability to know of both sides of the pendulum, makes us too one-sided, inflexible and more prone to other physical and mental health woes. Misfortunes can be prevented, if we know our pivotal points upfront.
  • Change is indispensable. If we don’t see this balance manifesting itself in our daily living, then we’re losing one of the finest gifts ever conferred by God to human beings. Magic. Once we become conscious of this gift, we’re destined to prosperity
  •  Che Guevara’s ingenious mind as a physician with intellectual shrewdness and reasoning as a revolutionary was usually confounded with madness
  •  In my world, whites invented racism, and white supremacy gave birth to black supremacy
  •  Indecisiveness is a killer. Populism is dangerous. Democracy is indecisive
  •  You need a lethal combination of lunacy and a veneer of diplomacy to free the poor of their suffering.”
  • Farming is a discipline. You don’t need a farm, but passion and requisite skills to farm.
  •  Politics is everything.” I argued. “In the jungle, at church, in your own home, everywhere. There’s politics in arts, fashion, psychiatry. Everything is politics
  •  The Amazon jungle is a more complex, intricate, and uncertain, with its labyrinth of underground, moist, mysterious green tunnels of foliage. The bushveld is drier, more tolerant, and less energetic. The jungle yields far greater energy than the bushveld.
  • They call it anthropomorphism. This is the ‘Law of the Rights of Mother Earth.’ By law, the Amazon is treated as a human being. It is sacred land indispensable to humankind. This law subscribes to a mix of key natural elements; the air, the sun and water
  •  We survived the ramped up seasons, feeling the cold weather, the heat, the storms, and the spring. For us, there was merely one season – a season to look after our herds of cattle.
  • The herd boys in the jungle were no different to the lunatics in a psychiatric hospital. They all heard voices, from varied sources. The one group received a sound of birds and other mammals, from the jungle. Others heard voices from their heads.
  • The jungle offered an abundant environment for good and bad things. Where God is, the devil is present. As the saying goes, lightness and darkness co-exists. The jungle makes excessive offerings ranging from pure air, light of the soul and energy. The devil counters these with drugs, exploitation, and even the murder of innocent people.
  • Suffering is a self-inflicted state of mind and thoughts.
  • Can’t quit being gay because I couldn’t quit being tall or short or being white. Nothing can escape the mind and the eyes of deception.
  • I carried out a pledge to God that only an exceptional man will have entry to my castle and the magical light that glitters inside it
  •  You are the soul of my heart. The man I want to spend my entire life with.
  • Happiness is the greatest invention in our lifetime. Many people do not know this open secret
  •  Separation is a simple state of mind. It is not real.
  • The molars of the boys in the dark, resembled ridges of the Andes range
  •  Pam and I have discovered the two sacred elements of life: madness and magic. The Amazon treasures have become the third sacred element.
  • Diplomacy is not for everyone. It is a calling. Diplomats are like herd boys. Beasts of burden.
  • Each cobbled stone on the street represents a slave, the amount of pain and suffering they encountered more than five hundred years ago.
  • Each clattering of the wings from whirring birds above me represented a heartbeat of every street child, a herd boy, a mentally ill person, a slave, a mineworker, a llama, and a donkey.
  • The white people, like pebbles, were sheltering behind opulence and supremacy. The poor, yellow people simply sought protection from the snow.