Pascha Sotolongo > Pascha's Quotes

“You might think the desert dreams of the sea, but I think deserts dream of other deserts, scorched spaces just like themselves. With them, they don’t feel so alien, so bizarre. They don’t have the bother of explaining—the way they would with the sea—how it is they’re all sand and rock and sagebrush and how the only sound is the wind across the earth.”
― Pascha Sotolongo, The Only Sound Is the Wind: Stories

“You think your life is unfurling in a certain way, and you let yourself grow happy about it, a smile rising at the slightest thing. A boy in short pants eating a pastelito makes you grin like a lunatic at the vision of your own hoped‐for children, their dark shiny heads rising, year by year, from the Cuban earth, your wife towering behind them, kind and wise. Then you find yourself in a midnight cemetery guarding your mustache from the covetous ghost of an American woman you once loved. Who wouldn’t laugh?”
― Pascha Sotolongo, The Only Sound Is the Wind: Stories

“At its core, The story is a simple one. For ages humans gave birth to humans and animals to animals. Then one day a woman in La Crosse, Wisconsin, gave birth to a puppy, a Lab-greyhound mix, to be exact. It weighed a pound, they said, though I don’t suppose that meant much to most of us at the time. It was well known that human newborns weigh around eight pounds, but average folks knew nothing of the birth weight of dogs. Later, after the story had broken and the puppy grew into a twenty-five-pound twelve-week-old, the woman consented to an interview.”
― Pascha Sotolongo, The Only Sound Is the Wind: Stories