Rosario Ferré Quotes

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

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

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

…I grew up in Ponce where all our domestic service was black. I always had a lot of contact with them, and to a degree they gave me the kind of love that my family denied me. And so I have that sympathy—or empathy—for la gente de color (people of color), and I cannot help it. However, I do not like to create archetypes. If it is possible to break down a novel into archetypes, it is not a good novel…

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")

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.

(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.

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.

…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.

(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.

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

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.

Books grow and become something else

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