Cristina Garcia Quotes

I imagine these men sitting in fashion control centers around the world thinking of new ways to torture women, new ways to make them wince twenty years from now when they look at old photographs of themselves.

For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless. It exists now so we can call and wave from opposite shores.

Would you mind taking off your shirt?

Mirrors are for misery, nothing more ... they record decay.

Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent.

Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance.

It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference.

Down the street, the trees are imprisoned equidistantly in square plots of dirt. Everything else is concrete. Lourdes remembers reading somewhere about how Dutch elm disease wiped out the entire species on the East Coast except for a lone tree in Manhattan surrounded by concrete. Is this, she wonders, how we'll all survive?

You never knew what to expect with Ingrid. One minute she could be sawing the locks off Pierpont's freezers; the next, providing shelter for the homeless birds of Switzerland.

Jan-Peter offered to teach me the language of Amsterdam's red light district ... But after his first phrase
'Using the back door will cost you double'
I withdrew my request.

I've been wondering lately whether fear is necessary for survival, whether it sharpens the senses during storms of uncertainity. Or is it, as I suspect, merely another variant of weakness?

No small amount of schadenfreude. Do you know what that means?"
"Dad, it's the lifeline of gossip. Of course I know what it means.

The salesmen bought me perfume and invited me to lunch. But they couldn't talk to me about why families of guajiros slept in the city's parks under flashing Coca-Cola signs. Those men only murmured sweet nonsense to me, trying in vain to flatter me.

There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're capable of.

Nobody is ready for death. If you ask Joe Blow on the street, he aint gonna tell you he thinks he'll live forever. But when the end is near you'll realize you've been believing that all along. It's like getting caught with your pants down. That's why you gotta live, little one. Yeah stop and smell them roses.