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Although she used all the pots in the kitchen and it looked as if a bomb had exploded there, the result was well worth it. For it dispelled the feeling of loneliness that had overwhelmed her since the storm began. That loneliness, which in the past used to arrive unannounced like an unwelcome visitor, had now been relegated to a distant corner of her mind.
The once warm camaraderie of international meetings and electronic communication had frozen when put to the test of physical closeness.
Never had he imagined he would come to appreciate those aloof felines as part of the family he did not have.
The most dreadful thing about death was the idea of eternity. Dead forever, how terrible.
Her husband’s lies had created in her a definitive mistrust for the entire male gender.
“You never ask people in need who they are or where they’ve come from, Richard. We’re all the same in misfortune,” Joseph would preach to his son.
“I always thought that story about turning the other cheek was stupid. It only means you get a second slap,”
It was better to believe in everything than in nothing: that way she ran less risk of angering the gods, just in case they did exist.
Lena dubbed her daughter’s tendency to adorn the object of her infatuation with imagined virtues her “Christmas tree syndrome”: Lucia chose an ordinary fir tree and decorated it with baubles and tinsel that over time fell off until all that remained was the skeleton of a dried-out tree.
She made do with crumbs of affection, too proud to ask for more. She managed on her own, and he thanked her for it.
“This girl is a refugee. No one is illegal in this life, we all have the right to live in this world. Money and crime do not respect borders. I ask you, sir, why we human beings should do so?”
In her mother’s last days, Lucia understood that death was not an end, was not the absence of life, but a powerful oceanic wave of clear, luminous water that was carrying her off to another dimension.
“ ‘In the midst of winter, I finally found there was within me an invincible summer.’ ”
Someone asked what I was planning to write on the rapidly approaching January 8, the date when I have begun all my books for the past thirty-five
