Julia Alvarez Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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!