Silvia Moreno-Garcia Quotes

It’s never as fun seeing the monster as much as imagining.

Telling is a component of many cultures and it’s certainly present in many classics of Latin American literature. Modern American literature doesn’t seem to value telling as much as it once did or as much as other cultures still do. It’s seen as a sign of gracelessness. But of course, folklore is spoken, and there are benefits of telling rather than showing…

Categories should not act as straitjackets, and yet the magic realism label has sometimes strangled rather than liberated Latin American literature.

It's probably a lot better to imagine that you can deal with vampires and witches, because at least those, there's some ways to combat them. When you're talking about humans, there are no certain remedies for dealing with a band of roving soldiers.

when you come to places like Mexico and other states that were colonized, that question of race becomes very interesting because there's obviously a lot of race-mixing going on in these nations. And so it's not the same sort of eugenics that they're handling in Great Britain, where there is this great anxiety about miscegenation. It's a little bit different. It's still highly racist, but it's not exactly the same kind of thought process that is going on. And I just always found it so interesting how Europeans view the colonies as a space of fear, because it is that space where people are coming together and mixing.

I think one of the problems that happens with representations of — well, I’ll say with Mexicans, but in general with Latin Americans — is that we only get one type of story told. In general, the type of story that you get if you’re Latin American and you’re reading something in the English language — because it’s different if you’re reading Spanish fiction — you don’t get any genre fiction at all. The stories that you can tell are very limited. Normally they limit you to the suffering illegal immigrant.

In my experience, the term magic realism is often overused and stereotypical, spoken without much thought.

Noemí’s father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once.

Gothic has this slow, moody, syrupy sort of pace. That is what gives gothic its shape.

He'd fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams.

In her spare time, she looked to books or the stars for company.

The magic realism conundrum will not be resolved quickly or easily, but I believe a wider selection of books from writers with a Latin American heritage can help move us toward a world in which our vision of this region is vaster and richer. This is happening, albeit slowly.

I wasn’t very much interested in what is called gothic romance or a female gothic. I was always more into what is termed the male gothic, which is gothic books that have supernatural elements, graphic violence, and that kind of stuff. Sometimes we also call it gothic horror, as opposed to what we consider to be the female gothic, which is more like Scooby-Doo types of stories. Jane Eyre kinds of tales, in which a young woman goes to a distant location, meets some dude, and then there’s some kind of mystery to unravel. There is a happy ending — that is mostly the desire of that kind of story...It’s a liminal category, the gothic, and this is one side of it. But I was always more into the horror gothic. Into the Draculas of the world and the Carmillas.

But does it matter what we call Latin American literature? Isn’t a rose by any other name just as sweet? In my experience, it matters because categories create expectations.

Mortals have always been frightened of the night's velvet embrace and the creatures that walk in it, and yet they find themselves mesmerized by it.