Julia Alvarez Quotes

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.

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

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 uncles ate seconds and rose in a chorus
...empty plates glowed like the eyes of the spellbound.

33 is the year that Jesus Christ
embraced His life...
...Wasn't he crucified at 33,
I ask, depressed, deserted by his friends,
divorced from god, subject to human laws?
Wasn't he the most single finally
at 33, meeting his lonely end?
Yes...

Gloved with two potholders, I listened
while she told me not long ago
a girl could not marry until she could roll
her dough so transparent her beloved
could read his Bible through it.

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 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?

The typical Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, first of all traditionally involves a single character reaching a kind of epiphany or self-realization, and it has a forward trajectory, which is the classic structure of the novel. But I wanted to structure the novel so that the reader can experience, not by being told but shown, what it feels like to be an immigrant – you’re always going back, going back to where you came from to measure who you are today. So plot in a novel is not just how you’re going to fit all the pieces together or how you’re going to do the chronology. Plot is more sophisticated than that. It’s a way of structuring the way the reader thinks and feels.

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.

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

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!

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.

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 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.