The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.
She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you’ll know loss the rest of your life.
For me it’s a remarkable thing that there is a prize celebrating and honouring and making for a brief moment short fiction the centre of the literary universe.
She’s applying her lipstick; I’ve always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.
Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they’re running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.
Of course we all know that’s not how life works. The novel that is our life can end at any time. Sometimes even on page one.
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.
A person doesn’t mourn forever.
It’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, that prayer has dominion.
This is what I know: people’s hopes go on forever.
The half-life of love is forever.
Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That’s just the truth of it.
In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace – and because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.
Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who’s been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
Artists are not cheerleaders, and we’re not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we’re in.
It’s never the changes we want that change everything.
And that’s when I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.
There’s little question that short stories, like poetry, don’t get the respect they deserve in the culture – but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.
I just want some space to myself every now and then. Every time I’m with you I have this sense that you want something from me.