Julia Alvarez Quotes

My gay friends ask, Well are you gay or what?

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

My friend Carol says aging evens out
the advantage of beautiful women
over plain ones. ...
Where are the girls who were beautiful?

threading her needles, winding her threads;
the spools sat in their rods in the sewing box,
ends tucked in the notch on the flat tops,
a palette of greens, laurel, mint, olive, aquamarine,
shorts, skirts, blouses, dresses, and nightgowns—
better than storebought.

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.

I dreamed of stretching my pastry dough out
to cover the earth with a crust so fine
my love would think it was nothing
but the world at his feet,
baked by the summer sun,
dusted with cinnamon.

(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.

I say, Don't trust those men with better,
bigger versions of love if they refuse
the small, shabby sample they gave others
the tribute of believing it was true.

History, I was learning, is the story we tell ourselves about what really happened. My task as a writer/novelist was to try to get as many versions of that reality and then imaginatively construct the story. The fact that there were so many versions of what really happened should not surprise us: After all, we experience history as individuals through our particular characters, personalities, points of view. This reality of how we live history ideally suits the form of a novel, which focuses on “the truth according to character.

I’m more in the Faulkner tradition. I’m writing my Spanish in English. Florid, flowing, expansive, rococo sounds, the sonority of Spanish closer to the Latin roots than the English, which has been also infused with Anglo Saxon, Germanic words. Really, it’s part of my English. It’s how I write English.

...the furious whir of the Singer.

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!

Even though they’re that unit of four sisters, they’re also individuals. One will find her way of integrating that transition or failing at it, but I think that throughout, the telling of stories – the mother tells stories, the father tells stories and the daughters tell stories to each other – becomes the string in the labyrinth for them. Storytelling. Stories create meaning and structure out of the chaos. They are a blueprint for experience. I think that is part of how they’re all helped, some more successfully than others.

But my house, though protected
with charms, can't block the spell mortality
has cast... I turn thirty-three.

Are we all with acute loneliness,
chronic patients trying to recover
the will to love?
...Sometimes the love
of another wounded one acts like a salve
which soothes the dying self but cannot heal
our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels
like to be human, and we are all well?