Rosario Ferré Quotes

…there should be an absolute identification between the individual's experience and the writer's so that [experience] serves as the starting point for being able to write a short story or a novel later on…

I have had many opinions in my life because I have lived many lives. Ultimately, I can say that in all of my many lives, I have tried to do one fundamental thing: I have attempted to bring self-respect back to Puerto Ricans. That has been my purpose and I have been consistent in this. I believe that if readers can see themselves in what I write, if they realize that they share something with those characters, then they can understand themselves better and they can accept themselves. And when you accept yourself, you gain self-respect. If I have provided that space for two or three people in the world, I am more than satisfied.

being Puerto Rican is more than speaking and writing a language, and more than a language. It is a culture and a way of thinking; an environment; customs; food; a very complex context.

"The Youngest Doll" was a very important story. It was the story that showed me how to write. It was my first breakthrough.

I know publishing it may have dire results, but a tale, like life itself, isn't finished until it is heard by someone with an understanding heart. (Isabel, p380)

…Feminine literature is much more subversive than the literature of the men because women often dare to delve into prohibited areas bordering the irrational and the mad, areas dealing with love and death, areas which in our rational, productive, and utilitarian society become dangerous when one acknowledges their existence.

[He] worshiped her; her merest whim was a matter of dogma to him. If he lived in a world of fantasy in which art had taken the place of religion, that was all right with her. After all, I can help him be happy in life as well as in death, she thought. Our needs cancel each other out, and that's as solid a base for love as any. ("Isolda's Mirror")

Literature is prophetic-life often lives up to fiction ("Preface: Memoir of Diamond Dust")

Abby used to say adaptability was the secret of survival-one's soul should bend and then it wouldn't break. (chapter 29, p295)

The events we are about to tell took place when the Metropolis began to rinse the blood of Saint John the Baptist's lamb off its hands, as it sat gentle and tame on our country's flag. Its senators and representatives were at peace with their consciences and never tried to justify their decision to leave: in recent sessions they had voted unanimously to cede the island its independence. In any case, deep down we had always wanted to be free without daring to be so, and now they were going to help us reach our goal. As the biblical lamb of the Psalms had lain calmly beside the still waters, so had we slept for more than a century under the Metropolis's flag, and it was understandable that now we should be terrified to swim out by ourselves onto the wild, roaring seas. (beginning of "Captain Candelario's Heroic Last Stand")

I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castañeda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world.

"Sometimes it's necessary to believe in love, even if it doesn't exist," he said with a suave smile. ("Isolda's Mirror")

If the writer is trying to interpret the meaning of life, all of what he writes is autobiographical…When you write fiction, you are wearing a mask, you are dealing with magic. The novelist is like the shaman; he reinterprets the life of the tribe in terms of his fictitious characters, in order to bring out the devils. And that's what literature does.

The fundamental truth of my life, the principle that governs it, is that nobody has a monopoly over the truth. Every person is a lens that focuses reality in a different way and everybody has the right to do so. This, in fact, is an anarchist principle, for I am indeed, an anarchist. From the moment I position myself at a certain standpoint, I immediately see things from that perspective and from its opposing perspective…

the most revolutionary aspect of my books resides in their participation in the feminist struggle—in the search for individual freedom.