Quotes from Esmeralda Santiago

if you don't exist in the arts of a culture, you're invisible. The arts are what express the soul of who we are and that expresses our humanity.

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.

How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unknown?

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

Another train will come. Why rush? Why worry? Why go crazy? Another train will come. And sure enough, another train going my way was pulling into the station. My bad mood evaporated. I entered the car smiling, certain that there would be more missed trains in my life, more closed doors in my face, but there would always be another train rumbling down the tracks in my direction.

They have no achievements of their own. They've made nothing, created nothing, worked at nothing. They will leave no trace that they ever existed. They have no legacy except for their names, which they did nothing to earn.

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.

The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter.

Envy, Doña Lola had once said, eats at you from the inside and turns your eyes green when you look at the person of whom you're jealous.

It' her life, and she' in the middle of it.

There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling in the night, more long absences. Until it seemed as if anything would be better than living with these people who hated each other.

I would just as soon remain jamona than shed that many tears over a man.

In the Spanish-speaking Americas, Christmas is much more than a one-day event followed by a staggering credit card bill. The festivities last for weeks, beginning well before Christmas, and continuing straight through to the arrival of the Three Kings and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Las Navidades involves a lot more partying and a lot less shopping than a US. Christmas.

Ana had experienced reactions like Ramon's in the mirrored salons of Sevilla society, in the waxed halls of the Convento de las Buenas Madres, on the streets of Cadiz and San Juan. It was a look that said, "I see you, but I deign not to speak to you." It said, "I see you but I do not share the high opinion you have of yourself." It said, "I see you but you're not who I want to see." It said, "To me, you don't exist.

We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt.

and the shortcuts through the woods that led to the next barrio where all sorts of pocavergüenzas took place.

El bohío de la loma, bajo sus alas de paja, siente el frescor mañanero y abre sus ojos al alba. Vuela el pájara del nido. Brinca el gallo de la rama. A los becerros, aislados de las tetas de las vacas, les corre por el hocico leche de la madrugada. Las mariposas pululan —rubí, zafir, oro, plata...—: flores huérfanas que rondan buscando a las madres ramas...

He's younger than you are," she told Mami. "You should be ashamed.

Ay Dios Mío Santo, help me make it through their puberties!