Rosario Ferré Quotes

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 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.

There's still a fraternity of men. They admire themselves, and they admire each other's works. I think they are a little bit scared of women, too.

The word is extremely important. As a writer, it is my means for self-definition, the tool to express my idiosyncracies, my personality. It is also like a painter's brush which I use to depict the reality of my people.

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.

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

When they ran down the street, their souls barely clung to their bones, like fragile kites made of tissue paper. (chapter 4, p31)

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

My grandmother always insisted that when people fall in love they should look closely at what the family of the betrothed is like, because one never marries the bridegroom alone but also his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and the whole damned tangle of the ancestral line. I refused to believe her even after what happened when Quintín and I were still engaged. (beginning of QUINTÍN AND ISABEL'S PLEDGE)

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.

("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.

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