In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

The country people around the farm say that until the nail is hit, it doesn’t believe in the hammer.

Minerva says a soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. That is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.

I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country.

Now when I asked myself, What do you want, Minerva Mirabal? I was shocked to find I didn’t have an answer.

“I don’t want to have to live without you.”

if writing sinks below a certain level of awareness of its times it is not good writing.

Novels are not polemical arguments,

mobilizing people with ideology and propaganda. Instead they work one imagination at a time, rooting conviction in the heart, stirring us deeply, and thereby bringing about a more profound and lasting transformation. The muscles of compassion we exercise as readers are, after all, the same ones that motivate us to change the world.