Rosario Ferré Quotes

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

Books grow and become something else

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)

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.

He created the house on the lagoon as one would create a poem or a statue, breathing life into its every stone. (chapter 6, p49)

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")

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

(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.

Coral explained to Manuel that political ideals were very important. Believing in something made you think; it kept your spirit alive. (chapter 34, p340)

Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn't have them, it's our duty to invent them. ("Sweet Diamond Dust")

…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.

These times made me search for guidance within myself, for a reason to live. This is where my literature comes from.

I certainly don't think that the discovery and colonization of America by Spain is anything that should be glorified. The first Indians who came into contact with the Spaniards were the Taínos, the native Puerto Rican Indians, who were a very peaceful people. The relationship which developed at first was very interesting because the Indians had no idea what the Spaniards would eventually do, and they trusted them and befriended them. The Indian leader Agüeybana even offered his daughter in marriage to Juan Ponce de León. But then they realized that what the Spaniards were doing was taking them as slaves, and this is when they began to rebel, without any success. When one thinks of what happened, it is truly an extermination of a people, comparable only to what happened with the Jews in World War II.

I think that accepting biculturalism is smarter than perpetuating the unyielding Nazi, fascist idea that we can only speak Spanish in Puerto Rico and that we can only think in nationalist terms.

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.