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

Books grow and become something else

…there should be an absolute identification between the individual's experience and the writer's so that [experience] serves as the starting point for being able to write a short story or a novel later on…

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.