JULIA ALVAREZ, ‘IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES’
It’s about time we woman had a voice in running our country.
“But do you love him?”
“With all my heart,” Lina signed. “More than my life.”
A soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. This is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.
And the chocolate is not made of enough chocolate.
We must keep quite and not visit each other, but think only of our immortal souls. I’m so tired of mine.
My mind, my heart, my soul is in the clouds. It took me some doing and undoing to bring me down to earth.
Is pity always part of love?
“ You are not getting a fancy, high-talking man in Pedrito Gonzalez,” he said rather fiercely. “But you are getting a man who adores you like he does to this rich soil we’re standing on.”
I can write the saddest things tonight.
Here I’m looking at the stars, everything so still, so mysterious.
What does it all mean, anyway?
I want to know things I don’t even know what they are.
But I could happy Without answers if I had someone to love.
And so it is of human life the goal to seek, forever seek, the kindred soul.
I keep hoping that someone special will come into my life soon. Someone who can ravish my heart with the flames of love.
That abandoned part of herself where she had hoped to give love, and to receive it, in full measure, both direction. Being there, she couldn’t help herself.
His drinking, always social, became more solitary.
Let the nights be totally dark. But even that dark wish she made on one of those stars.
You start with a line from a song or a poem. Then you just say it over until you feel yourself calming down. I kept myself sane that way.
What matters is the quality of a person. What someone is inside themselves.
Then one day, you’re out of here free, only to discover you’ve locked yourself up and thrown away the key somewhere too deep inside your heart to fish it out.
Today Bananas are 5 cents each (tiny brown ones); a piece of ice, 15 cents; one cigarette, 3cents; and a bottle of milk that is really half water, 15 cents. Everything is for sale here, everything but your freedom.
You think you are going to crack any day, but the strange thing is that every day you surprise yourself by pulling it off, and suddenly you start feeling stronger, like maybe you are going to make it through this hell with some dignity, some courage, and most important — never forget this, Mate — with some love still in your heart for the men who have done this to you.