The world is a very unjust, unfair place and we have to live with that. Historically, there is impunity for most crimes.
And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It’s important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.
I think that my life changed at 50. Many things happened. Menopause, the end of youth and my daughter died that year after being a whole year in a coma. So I think that I changed and I became an elder at 50.
The connection that I have with my readers makes me very happy, and gives meaning to the strange profession of writing.
I think I was a feminist before the word was invented.
The hardest thing in love is to let go.
The most poor and backward areas in the world are those in which women are subjugated and exploited. Improving the situation of the woman improves the family, the community, and by extension the whole country.
She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.
You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?
It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail... Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us.
I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.
There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed.
Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.
She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh.
What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?
As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?
Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.
She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people’s pets.
Because I have time to spare, and for the first time in my life nobody expects anything of me. I don’t have to prove anything, I’m not rushing everywhere; each day is a gift I enjoy to the fullest.