Judith Ortiz Cofer Quotes

The oldest woman in the village, Paciencia, predicts the weather from the flight of birds: Today it will rain toads, she says, squinting her face into a mystery of wrinkles as she reads the sky - tomorrow, it will be snakes.

I have always known that you will visit my grave. I see myself as a small brown bird, perhaps a sparrow, watching you from a low branch as you pray in front of my name. I will hear you sound out my epitaph: Aqui descansa una mujer que quiso volar. You will recall telling me that you once dreamed in Spanish, and felt the words lift you into flight. The sound of wings will startle you when you say "volar," and you will understand.

You are transformed into one of the gypsy ancestors we have never discussed.

Mourning suits us Spanish women. Tragedy turns us into Antigone - maybe we are bred for the part.

Without you, I am an empty place where spiders crawl and nothing takes root.

The decade is over, time to begin forgiving old sins. Thirteen years since your death on a Florida interstate - and again a dream of an old wrong.

I was chaos on the first day, waiting for the Word.

Living with her taught me this: That silence is a thick and dark curtain, the kind that pulls down over a shop window; that love is the repercussion of a stone bouncing off that same window - and that pain is something you can embrace, like a rag doll nobody will ask you to share.

In the wind that may travel as far as you have gone, I send this message: Out here, in a place you will not forget, a simple man has been moved to curse the rising sun and to question God's unfinished work.

She was mourning all her life - not for her husband, who had released her with his death, but for her own dead heart.

Quincenañera My dolls have been put away like dead children in a chest I will carry with me when I marry. I reach under my skirt to feel a satin slip bought for this day. It is soft as the inside of my thighs. My hair has been nailed back with my mother's black hairpins to my skull. Her hands stretched my eyes open as she twisted braids into a tight circle at the nape of my neck. I am to wash my own clothes and sheets from this day on, as if the fluids of my body were poison, as if the little trickle of blood I believe travels from my heart to the world were shameful. Is not the blood of saints and men in battle beautiful? Do Christ's hands not bleed into your eyes from His cross? At night I hear myself growing and wake to find my hands drifting of their own will to soothe skin stretched tight over my bones. I am wound like the guts of a clock, waiting for each hour to release me.

The sun and the endless hours of swinging a machete in the fields had taken him from child to old man with no stage in between.