Silvia Moreno-Garcia Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

I wish we had more nuanced, complex conversations about books. Why can’t we speak in expansive terms about genre and aesthetics? About mood and texture? About things that fit into categories and the ones that defy them?

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.