Candelaria Quotes

“That's okay. That's all right. He had treated life the way it should always be: long and short at the same time. He had tried so hard because he always felt guilty, but he also always felt hopeful. Naively hopeful. Foolishly so. But you had to be, he concluded, falling down into the snow, the wires in his legs smoking. You had to be.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“This is who I am! All of those generations of suffering amounted to me in the end! Sorry!”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“She wanted to be locked inside a necklace and haunt it until everyone she knew during that period of time was dead.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“For Zoe's entire life, all she wanted was love all-consuming, wrapped around her like cellophane, tight enough around so that she lost a little bit of oxygen and was able to fall asleep.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“Love was a pox for her family that she had quarantined herself from for years.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“It was a habit of children of immigrants to sometimes talk in an almost-accent so that their parents would understand them. It was also a habit to lie.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“There is not that much romance in this book, and that is because I was in love while writing it.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“When somebody finds a secret, they do what they want with it. A secret can change, based on who it's told to.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“her sister Zoe, who ran away for her love, it turns out, just for love, and how pathetic Candy thought it was just because it was vulnerable, and how actually, that was the hardest thing, to be soft enough to cut into, and how lucky it was that her sister got to feel that way, open to the world, and how if she, Candy, wasn't the last of her family, then maybe there would be someone else, who could do it, all of it, all of this around us, a little bit better.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria

“You can try your hardest to protect yourself and the people you love, but sometimes your imagination cannot account for the actions of other people. Or events. Or things.”
― Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Candelaria