Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Julia Alvarez

29 quotes

“Mine was an oral culture, full of storytellers, but reading and writing were not encouraged. (No public libraries, no free press!) Coming to the United States suddenly thrust me into a world where I was an alien, where I spoke the language with an accent. This abrupt and painful “translation” led me to the company of books, the homeland of the imagination where all were welcomed. In trying to master my new language of English, I had to pay attention to words, their little reputations and atmospheres, their exact weights and balances, their smells and sounds and textures…”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“History, I was learning, is the story we tell ourselves about what really happened. My task as a writer/novelist was to try to get as many versions of that reality and then imaginatively construct the story. The fact that there were so many versions of what really happened should not surprise us: After all, we experience history as individuals through our particular characters, personalities, points of view. This reality of how we live history ideally suits the form of a novel, which focuses on “the truth according to character.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pies browned, the pastries puckered in the cavernous oven I waited to open.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gloved with two potholders, I listened while she told me not long ago a girl could not marry until she could roll her dough so transparent her beloved could read his Bible through it.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I dreamed of stretching my pastry dough out to cover the earth with a crust so fine my love would think it was nothing but the world at his feet, baked by the summer sun, dusted with cinnamon.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The tarragon dotted the rice in the cauldron. And now, as if signaled, the spice jars popped open, unladened their far east wonders: cumin, turmeric, saffron, and endives. The aunts each put in a shake of their favorites. The steam unwrinkled their frowns from their faces.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the aunts stopped in in the middle of swallows, heads cocked... as if they had heard ...their own baby crying. It needed a pinch more of saffron? Paprika?”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The uncles ate seconds and rose in a chorus ...empty plates glowed like the eyes of the spellbound.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I remember the whirr and whine of her black Singer, the gold traceries on the cast iron rod by the wheel that lifted and lowered the needle. Threading, eyepieces, winding the turquoise string through hooks, around miniscule wheels, up and down, her hands clever in labyrinths, ...the needle racing through gingham, poplin, seersucker, cambric, the pedal pressed heavily down with the weight of one woman, eye intent, hands feeding and receiving the fabric.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“threading her needles, winding her threads; the spools sat in their rods in the sewing box, ends tucked in the notch on the flat tops, a palette of greens, laurel, mint, olive, aquamarine, shorts, skirts, blouses, dresses, and nightgowns— better than storebought.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the furious whir of the Singer.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But my house, though protected with charms, can't block the spell mortality has cast... I turn thirty-three.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My friend Carol says aging evens out the advantage of beautiful women over plain ones. ... Where are the girls who were beautiful?”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My gay friends ask, Well are you gay or what?”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“33 is the year that Jesus Christ embraced His life... ...Wasn't he crucified at 33, I ask, depressed, deserted by his friends, divorced from god, subject to human laws? Wasn't he the most single finally at 33, meeting his lonely end? Yes...”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Are we all with acute loneliness, chronic patients trying to recover the will to love? ...Sometimes the love of another wounded one acts like a salve which soothes the dying self but cannot heal our lives. And perhaps this is what it feels like to be human, and we are all well?”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's UPS with two parcels! ... a handsome lad, guesses it's my birthday and asks how old I am. He acts surprised he's a decade younger. We linger at the door one of us is not immortal anymore.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm watching a romantic play in Plato's cave; half the time I don't believe in it... Other times I'm so addicted I'm one of the mainliners... hallucinating that in truth a man's body is one of the Absolute Forms. I look around when the houselights come on and see no one!”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I say, Don't trust those men with better, bigger versions of love if they refuse the small, shabby sample they gave others the tribute of believing it was true.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was driving down the mountain, the curves were bad, I wasn't going slow, the day was one of those that takes your breath away... On hilltops, I made believe I'd take off into the absolute, but as I swerved again and again... and as the sun's autumnal, soporific light shone on... something gave in me and I let go— this driving need to make it all mean more. In time, I turned the wheel back to the road.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I tried to listen, take notes ... ...and stared out on the New England meadow straight from Frost: acres of grasses and flowers tossed by a wind which whirled with the continual roar of a thousand voices from Babel.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even though they’re that unit of four sisters, they’re also individuals. One will find her way of integrating that transition or failing at it, but I think that throughout, the telling of stories – the mother tells stories, the father tells stories and the daughters tell stories to each other – becomes the string in the labyrinth for them. Storytelling. Stories create meaning and structure out of the chaos. They are a blueprint for experience. I think that is part of how they’re all helped, some more successfully than others.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was looking for books and stories and novels that addressed our history in the Americas. And there weren’t that many for young readers. I saw that they had a lot of books about the Holocaust and about slavery, but not that much about kids growing up in a dictatorship up and down the Americas, which was the phenomenon of the last century in many of our countries. Many Latinos in the Dominican Republic had grandparents or parents who had fled from dictatorships. I wanted our own Anne Frank story. And that was really the story I set in the Dominican Republic in the Trujillo dictatorship.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’m more in the Faulkner tradition. I’m writing my Spanish in English. Florid, flowing, expansive, rococo sounds, the sonority of Spanish closer to the Latin roots than the English, which has been also infused with Anglo Saxon, Germanic words. Really, it’s part of my English. It’s how I write English.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What moves you most in a work of literature?) JA: Accuracy of language and perception — the writer is not striving for effect and gets out of the way to let us see the world through the lens of language. I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to start the writing day with poetry; like the choir master sounding a note on his pipe, it sets the standard high (“No approximate words in a poem,” Dickinson says) and puts me in the right register. Novels are great for breaks — a reward and relief from the labors of writing.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing is hard work, a huge commitment of time, energy, faith, passion, and there’s nothing shameful in the attempt, even if the work doesn’t end up succeeding. I’d rather let someone else do the public culling — I’m exacting enough in private.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what I know from experience: that writing is a vocation and a practice over a lifetime, with its ups and downs. It teaches me humility, the great democracy of each time having to start over.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The typical Bildungsroman, the novel of growing up, first of all traditionally involves a single character reaching a kind of epiphany or self-realization, and it has a forward trajectory, which is the classic structure of the novel. But I wanted to structure the novel so that the reader can experience, not by being told but shown, what it feels like to be an immigrant – you’re always going back, going back to where you came from to measure who you are today. So plot in a novel is not just how you’re going to fit all the pieces together or how you’re going to do the chronology. Plot is more sophisticated than that. It’s a way of structuring the way the reader thinks and feels.”
Julia Alvarez (born 1950) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source