Quotes from Cristina García

She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasure and perfected selections.

Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present.

Who chooses what we know or what's important? I know I have to decide these things for myself.

Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.

Perhaps only this: that the greatest danger in life is certainty. Yes, I do believe that. Our last redoubt in the world is wonder. Wonder and unknowing. Now and then a random detail will stir me to faint recognitions: a row of dead beetles in the grass; the chapped knees of some dowager on the S-bahn. Tantalizing signs reminding me that infinity billows out from every moment. That's when I lean in, sniff the air, cock my ears like a foxhound- and listen.

What more do you need? Poetry? Poetry is in the living. Little Sister, in the dreaming. Nobody in the world can teach you that.

Inés de Bobadilla, Cuba's first woman governor

His projects conduct electricity, engage motion with toothed wheels, react in concert with universal laws of physics.

In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.

What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?

Revolution required illusion. The two went hand in glove, like a plate of rice and beans.

Without the U.S. embargo, the Revolution couldn't have survived. It'd needed a common enemy to blame for its economic ills. In the end consumerism, not guns would destroy Socialism. Microwaves and computers, motorcycles, iPhones, Omaha Steaks.

I've been wondering lately whether fear is necessary for survival, whether it sharpens the senses during storms of uncertainity. Or is it, as I suspect, merely another variant of weakness?

She ponders the transmigrations from southern latitudes. the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?

unfold an ornate portable mirror and invite my lovers

Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.

In short, the period following the end of World War I was not just marked by the conclusion of the war to end all wars, but also by a profound shift in the logistics of the world

The family is a police state, the Visitor said, describing how minuscule stages lit up inside her, repeating key scenes from her life. Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them? After a long silence, A. said: Childhood is a city you never leave. In Berlin's past, we seek our own.

Do people remember only what they can endure, or distort memories until they can endure them?

I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea's consoling silence.

There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.

For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.

I still love you, Gustavo, but it's a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain.