Rosario Ferré Quotes

All writers are unhappy with reality and so they want to build a world where things are open to change. They have created a different space where they would like to be. All writing is, in that sense, a meeting of reality but also an escaping of it.

She seldom smiled, but when she did, I felt as if she were pouring oil on my wounds. (chapter 19, p204)

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

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…

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

(Q: In "When Women Love Men" every woman who is sexually repressed would like to break those taboos and simply be sexually free.) If you read Freud or a little psychoanalysis, you know that society has to control that or there would be total anarchy. But everybody has the same desires. The important thing was that when this story came out no Puerto Rican woman had ever written about sex. My story is just a little story, and it's not Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, but I think I was trying to go in that direction.

When I was fourteen I used to read literature in English. I read textbooks and the newspapers in Spanish, but when I really started to get into literature was when I started reading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

("What is your reaction when you have finished a work?") I almost always like it immediately after finishing it. I continue to think that I wrote something quite good for a period of maybe six months or a year. But after a year and a half I begin to see some flaws in it, after two years it begins to look pretty bad, after three years it is horrendous, and by the fourth year I want to burn the book.

I have always wanted to understand certain things about myself and my life, but in order to know what I think, I have to write it down first.

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.

It's not that I want to victimize men, but I think that women have been the victims throughout the centuries, a fact which has been incorporated into mythology and which I thought it was high time to change.

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)

Books grow and become something else

(Many of your stories use dolls as symbols of women's restricted lives. Were you sort of a doll in your marriage?) Yes, I was. Definitely. But in Puerto Rico most of the women of my generation were in the same situation. I was no exception. Women who wanted to change that or go against that stereotype would be considered odd or slightly crazy. The only reason they couldn't say the same about me was because I made it in the world of literature.

Puerto Rico, like all the countries of the Caribbean, is a nation where fantastic reality, the world of magic, is ever present. There are various sects of white magic, such as Santeria. It is a reality that is very palpable in our environment, and this is why there are no great differences between fantasy and reality...All Caribbean writers have this in common.