The worst of it wasn't the fact of being locked up, because life went on inside, and was sometimes more interesting than outside. The most highly qualified "prisoners of war"-- and the teaching staffs of all the southern universities were there-- set up various faculties, so a lot of us learnt languages, maths, quantum physics, world history, art history or the history of philosophy. Over two weeks, a professor called Iriarte gave a magnificent seminar on Keynes and the political reasoning of contemporary economists, which was attended by several army officers in addition to the hundred or so prisoners. The journalist and writer Andres Muller discoursed on the tactical errors of the Paris Communards, to the astonishment of the troops guarding the shoemaking workshop, which we had christened the Great Hall of the Temuco Anethaeum. Another famous POW, Genaro Avendano-- he was 'disappeared' in 1979-- moved both prisoners and soldiers with a dramatisation of the writer Unamuno's 1936 Salamanca speech denouncing Franco's Falangists. -Luis Sepulveda, Full Circle

As a child he'd seen snow, like sheepskin set out to dry, on the ridges of the Imbabura volcano, and sometimes he felt it an unforgivable extravagance that the characters in his novels should tread on snow without worrying about making it dirty.
-Luis Sepulveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories