Julia Alvarez Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 furious whir of the Singer.

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

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.

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...

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!