Esmeralda Santiago Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

She’d worried at the beginning when she first met them that there were too many patrones. But within weeks she was sure that there was really one boss, and that the other three were working for her.

Plito, chicken Gallina, hen Lápiz, pencil y Pluma, pen. Ventana, window Puerta, door Maestra, teacher y Piso, floor.

It worried her she was getting used to being there, isolated in another, slower time that encouraged reflection.

It seemed too complicated, as if each one of us were really two people, one who was loved and the official one who, I assumed, was not.    

The silence around her was total, not rich and full like Abuela’s when she crocheted, but empty and sad and lonesome.

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.

He’s younger than you are,” she told Mami. “You should be ashamed.

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

But Miguel is the last Argoso and I intend to raise him under my roof, with my values, and, yes, even my prejudices and perhaps some of my vices. That's my prerogative, you see, as the patriarch of this family.

Just as she'd stripped her body of frills and fripperies in two decades in Puerto Rico, she'd shed her religious belief in much the same way the conquistadores did, for expedience. They arrived in the New World with priests and incantations, but the history of the conquest was strewn with their atrocities, their false promises, rape, their bastards, plunder and murder. They lost their moral center, compromised their faith in the New World. They then erected gold encrusted cathedrals in the Old World to turn humanity's eyes toward beauty and away from their sins.

n the tropical climates of the Caribbean and the temperate climes of South America, where Christmas falls smack in the middle of summer, there is no Santa arriving on a sleigh, no jingle bells in the snow, no stockings hung on the mantel with care. it's a holiday for family, for grown-ups as well as children, celebrated with plenty of traditional food, drink, music, and dance. Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, is the night for la misa del gullo, “the rooster's mass," which begins at midnight.

Sexta. Mis bienes consisten en mi casa, que antes fue del marqués de Villarrocha, y que con lo que dejo para su conclusión me cuesta veinticuatro mil pesos, de los que 5.320 son a censo y pertenecen por una capellanía legal a mi mujer, a cuyo nombre se compró la casa, estando yo en Bolivia. 18.400 pesos que me reconoce a censo la hacienda de Santiago, perteneciente a los señores Zaldumbides. 600 pesos de unos negros de mi propiedad que están en Esmeraldas.