Julia Alvarez Quotes

The pies browned, the pastries puckered
in the cavernous oven I waited to open.

I like to start the writing day with poetry; like the choir master sounding a note on his pipe, it sets the standard high (“No approximate words in a poem,” Dickinson says) and puts me in the right register. Novels are great for breaks — a reward and relief from the labors of writing.

Mine was an oral culture, full of storytellers, but reading and writing were not encouraged. (No public libraries, no free press!) Coming to the United States suddenly thrust me into a world where I was an alien, where I spoke the language with an accent. This abrupt and painful “translation” led me to the company of books, the homeland of the imagination where all were welcomed. In trying to master my new language of English, I had to pay attention to words, their little reputations and atmospheres, their exact weights and balances, their smells and sounds and textures…

The tarragon dotted the rice in the cauldron.
And now, as if signaled, the spice jars popped open,
unladened their far east wonders:
cumin, turmeric, saffron, and endives.
The aunts each put in a shake of their favorites.
The steam unwrinkled their frowns from their faces.

I was looking for books and stories and novels that addressed our history in the Americas. And there weren’t that many for young readers. I saw that they had a lot of books about the Holocaust and about slavery, but not that much about kids growing up in a dictatorship up and down the Americas, which was the phenomenon of the last century in many of our countries. Many Latinos in the Dominican Republic had grandparents or parents who had fled from dictatorships. I wanted our own Anne Frank story. And that was really the story I set in the Dominican Republic in the Trujillo dictatorship.

I'm watching a romantic play
in Plato's cave; half the time I don't
believe in it...
Other times I'm so addicted I'm one of the mainliners...
hallucinating that in truth a man's
body is one of the Absolute Forms.
I look around when the houselights come on
and see no one!

(What moves you most in a work of literature?) JA: Accuracy of language and perception — the writer is not striving for effect and gets out of the way to let us see the world through the lens of language. I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature.

It's UPS
with two parcels! ...
a handsome lad, guesses it's my birthday
and asks how old I am. He acts surprised
he's a decade younger. We linger at the door
one of us is not immortal anymore.

...the aunts stopped in in the middle of swallows,
heads cocked... as if they had heard
...their own baby crying.
It needed a pinch more of saffron? Paprika?

what I know from experience: that writing is a vocation and a practice over a lifetime, with its ups and downs. It teaches me humility, the great democracy of each time having to start over.

I was driving down the mountain, the curves
were bad, I wasn't going slow, the day
was one of those that takes your breath away...
On hilltops, I made believe I'd take off
into the absolute, but as I swerved
again and again...
and as the sun's
autumnal, soporific light shone on...
something gave in me and I let go—
this driving need to make it all mean more.
In time, I turned the wheel back to the road.

...the furious whir of the Singer.

Writing is hard work, a huge commitment of time, energy, faith, passion, and there’s nothing shameful in the attempt, even if the work doesn’t end up succeeding. I’d rather let someone else do the public culling — I’m exacting enough in private.

I tried to listen, take notes ...
...and stared out
on the New England meadow straight from Frost:
acres of grasses and flowers tossed by
a wind which whirled with the continual
roar of a thousand voices from Babel.

I remember the whirr and whine of her black Singer,
the gold traceries on the cast iron rod
by the wheel that lifted and lowered the needle.
Threading, eyepieces, winding the turquoise string
through hooks, around miniscule wheels, up and down,
her hands clever in labyrinths, ...the needle racing through gingham, poplin, seersucker, cambric,
the pedal pressed heavily down with the weight of one woman,
eye intent, hands feeding and receiving the fabric.