Quotes from Cristina García

We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.

Felicia stayed on the fringe of life because it was free of everyday malice. It was more dignified there.

That we can see and understand everything just as well alive as dead, only when we're alive we don't have the time, or the peace of mind, or the inclination to see and understand what we could. We're too busy rushing to our graves.

Solitude, Celia realizes now, exists for us not to remember but to forget.

I resent the hell out of the politicians and generals who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the memories we'll have when we're old.

The salesmen bought me perfume and invited me to lunch. But they couldn't talk to me about why families of guajiros slept in the city's parks under flashing Coca-Cola signs. Those men only murmured sweet nonsense to me, trying in vain to flatter me.

We don't speak at night anymore, but she's left me her legacy nonetheless--a love for the sea and the smoothness of pearls, an appreciation of music and words, sympathy for the underdog, and a disregard for boundaries.

To survive is an act of hope.

Mírame, miénteme, pégame, mátame si quieres Pero no me dejes. No, no me dejes, nunca jamás Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.

You have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.

Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent.

Nobody is ready for death. If you ask Joe Blow on the street, he aint gonna tell you he thinks he'll live forever. But when the end is near you'll realize you've been believing that all along. It's like getting caught with your pants down. That's why you gotta live, little one. Yeah stop and smell them roses.

Mirrors are for misery, nothing more...they record decay.

Poetry by its very nature is subversive . . . It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

Jan-Peter offered to teach me the language of Amsterdam's red light district. ...But after his first phrase--'Using the back door will cost you double'--I withdrew my request.

You never knew what to expect with Ingrid. One minute she could be sawing the locks off Pierpont's freezers; the next, providing shelter for the homeless birds of Switzerland.

No small amount of schadenfreude. Do you know what that means?" "Dad, it's the lifeline of gossip. Of course I know what it means.

Would you mind taking off your shirt?

To live your life even half right seems extraordinary.

It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference.

Down the street, the trees are imprisoned equidistantly in square plots of dirt. Everything else is concrete. Lourdes remembers reading somewhere about how Dutch elm disease wiped out the entire species on the East Coast except for a lone tree in Manhattan surrounded by concrete. Is this, she wonders, how we'll all survive?

I imagine these men sitting in fashion control centers around the world thinking of new ways to torture women, new ways to make them wince twenty years from now when they look at old photographs of themselves.