Oscar Hijuelos Quotes

Oh yes!...The sweet summons of God to man. That's when He calls you up to His arms. And it's the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I'm in no rush to find out.

The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity.

On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life. Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky about the rooftops. A sky shimmery with the possibilities of the death; lights exaggerated, the heavens peeled back- a swirling haze of nebulae and comets - in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey

Glorious life ending. There must have been a moment when his son had gasped for air, the last time, as Jesus must. But as Jesus had risen, he wanted his son to rise up, organs and spirit and mind intact, and everything to be as it had been not so long ago.

The three grand old men of Cuban literature are Alejo Carpentier (his masterpiece is The Lost Steps); José Lezama Lima (whose autobiographical novel Paradiso infuriated Castro); and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (the setting of his novel Three Trapped Tigers—pre-Castro Havana—reminded me of Oscar Hijuelos’s A Simple Habana Melody From When the World Was Good).

bohemian proclivities,

clime, to talk about the Bible. To Clemens’s inquiry “What, in your opinion, is the Bible?” my father, with his effortless genius, summarized his feelings about it in a single phrase: “The Bible is a book of allegories made to instruct man in the higher principles that should guide life.” “And would you consider it a true

others were

Sober, he would regard his wife with amor—the kind of amor the oldest sisters, Margarita and Isabel, knew took place at the end of the evening, when they were all supposed to be asleep and not listening for bedroom noises, agitated springs, gasping, rocking movements, moans of pleasure, or any other such unparental sounds, drifting down the halls, as if they were wall-less and not a single cicada nor a rushing wind existed in all the world.

expression conveying to her, as male expressions would, the simple wish that he might connect with so pleasing a being, as if she were an angel with the power to remake a man’s life, his sense of the past and of himself, as if a woman was something in which a man and his history, his pains, his failings, could reside.