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 in… - Rosario Ferré

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)

Literature is made of many pieces, of a reinterpretation of similar themes, of a recycling of materials. Only the mask exists, and the writer wears it to interpret the manifold possibilities of humanity that exist around him. He learns to be a writer when he can take someone else's mask and make it a part of himself and talk from that mask.

[about being at college] It was there I learned that Ponce, which seemed as large as the universe itself when I lived on Aurora Street, was really a very small town. (chapter 18, p185)