Kathleen Alcalá Quotes

[He] had another secret in his heart. Every night his heart spoke to him. He did not understand what it was trying to say. It knocked loudly at the inside of his chest, so loudly that he feared that it would wake his wife, sleeping gently beside him. (p173)

People had big families in those days. And the thing we need to remember about them, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which is still true in most of Mexico, is that your family is your treasure. You may not have anything else, but people really value children

I hope that by including these cultures, the Jewish and indigenous as well as the mestizo, we can get past the idea that we are a monolithic people.

what I'm writing about in each of these novels is the notion that these are people who look around at the society they live in or the culture they live in and say, "This isn't necessarily where I belong. I need to change my place in history and I need to change my place in this culture."

Straightening the ruffles on the curtains, she could not forget it. Stirring the soup in the kitchen while Josefina bit her lips and waited for her to leave, she could not forget it. Sewing the torn lace back onto the hem of one of her daughters' petticoats, she could almost forget it, but Estela cringed every time she remembered the hurt, closed look on Zacarías' face as she tried to talk to him. (first lines)

In the desert, deep inside the spiny center of the cactus, nests a bird no bigger than my finger. While the sharp thorns fend off animals that would eat the eggs, the parent birds come and go at will. And this was my mother's name, "living at the heart of the spiny cactus," Chiri, what others would call Hummingbird. The last time I saw her was on the way to Casas Grandes. (first lines)

The writer and her language should be the humble servant of the reader. To me, the act of writing is not fulfilled until it is read. The words need to be read, digested, and assembled within the context of the reader's mind and experiences in order to be complete. In other words, every reader is "reading" a different story, because every reader brings a different set of experiences and sensibilities to the story.

Although his name would be forgotten, his family and belongings scattered, the ideas he helped to perpetuate would live on. The seeds of human dignity had been planted and were not easily stamped out. (p177)

In some cases, the stories take the reader right over the line to horror, the worst thing you can imagine fulfilled. In others, the fantastic elements are merely implied, and if the reader tried to pinpoint the specific elements that made the story fantastic, it would be impossible to do. Rather, the fantastic element lies in "the overall effect" that Edgar Allan Poe tried to infuse into each of his stories.

In Latin America, there hasn't necessarily been a clear line between fantastic literature and literary fiction. This has allowed writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Clarice Lispector to be noticed by upstanding and respectable critics of modern culture, and has led to the eventual translation of their work, as well as that of many others. They now form a canon of work against which all the rest of us must be compared, although, in many cases, we have little in common with them other than the Spanish language.

She could drop her shyness the way she dropped it to recite a speech or a poem, then step back into it like a cloak.

Since we were in church half the time, I used to sit there and read the Bible, which, like Shakespeare, encompasses most of the human condition.

He was now in country which he had never before explored, the land of the Tarahumara, the indígenes famous for running long distances over the rough and unforgiving terrain, often, it was said, for the pure joy of it. (p134)

I never made a distinction between realistic and magic realistic writing. The first book I read that probably fell into the accepted canon of magic realism was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, maybe in 1972 or ’73. I remember I found a copy in Spanish later and sent it to my parents, because it was so like our family stories. I also made my husband read it before we married, so that he would understand what sort of a family he was getting into.

That's how dreams are. Nothing ever quite happens, but you assume it's going to. It's as though your mind stops wasting energy on the image once it thinks you understand what's going on. (p163)