My mother took care of us until my father scrammed, and then she ended up working in the small-factory sector of New Jersey with a lot of other immigrants.
Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.
Sucks to be left out of adolescence, sort of like getting locked in the closet on Venus when the sun appears for the first time in a hundred years.
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.
I think one of the paradoxes of writing fiction is when people enjoy it, they want it to be real. So they look for connections.
A first lesson in the fragility of love and the preternatural cowardice of men. And out of this disillusionment and turmoil sprang Beli’s first adult oath, one that would follow her into adulthood, to the States and beyond. I will not serve.
Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world.
I’m an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant forever.
When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That’s what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.
When I was working on ‘Drown’ – this was way back in the mid-’90s – I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like ‘Drown’ that focused specifically on infidelity.
Well, when you look at a lot of science fiction novels they’re asking questions about power. There are questions about what it means to have power and what are the long-term consequences of power.
There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.
Shot at twenty-seven times – what a Dominican number...
Each morning, before Jackie started her studies, she wrote on a clean piece of paper: Tarde venientibus ossa. To the latecomers are left the bones.
I was neither black enough for the black kids or Dominican enough for the Dominican kids. I didn’t have a safe category.
She would be a new person, she vowed. They said no matter how far a mule travels it can never come back a horse, but she would show them all.
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.
The only way out is in.
Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral: a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her, so dark it was as if the Creatrix had, in her making, blinked.