Dreaming in Cuban Quotes

“You have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it.”
― Cristina Garcia, Dreaming In Cuban

“I’ve started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There’s a magic here working its way through my veins. There’s something about the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively - the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees. And I love Havana, its noise and decay and painted ladyness. I could happily sit on one of those wrought-iron balconies for days, or keep my grandmother company on her porch, with its ringside view of the sea. I’m afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I’d have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong - not instead of here, but more than here. How can I tell my grandmother this?”
― Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban

“Mirrors are for misery, nothing more...they record decay.”
― Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban

“I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea’s consoling silence.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“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.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“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.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Solitude, Celia realizes now, exists for us not to remember but to forget.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“I still love you, Gustavo, but it's a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Who chooses what we know or what's important? I know I have to decide these things for myself.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“I resent the hell out of the politicians and generals who force events on us that structure our lives, that dictate the memories we'll have when we're old.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“That we can see and understand everything just as well alive as dead, only when we're alive we don't have the time, or the peace of mind, or the inclination to see and understand what we could. We're too busy rushing to our graves.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“We don't speak at night anymore, but she's left me her legacy nonetheless--a love for the sea and the smoothness of pearls, an appreciation of music and words, sympathy for the underdog, and a disregard for boundaries.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“For many years in Cuba, nobody spoke of the problem between blacks and whites. It was considered too disagreeable to discuss. But my father spoke to me clearly so that I would understand what happened to his father and his uncles during the Little War of 1912, so that I would know how our men were hunted down day and night like animals, and finally hung by their genitals from the lampposts in Guáimaro. The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books. Why, then, should I trust anything I read? I trust only what I see, what I know with my heart, nothing more.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“In Cuba, everything seemed temporal, distorted by the sun.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Papi, I don't know what to do anymore." Lourdes begins to cry. "No matter what I do, Pilar hates me."
"Pilar doesn't hate you, hija. She just hasn't learned to love you yet.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“We speak in Spanish when we make love. English seems an impossible language for intimacy.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Felicia stayed on the fringe of life because it was free of everyday malice. It was more dignified there.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“She ponders the transmigrations from southern latitudes. the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Frustrated, El Líder went home, rested his pitching arm, and started a revolution in the mountains.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“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.”
― Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban

“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?”
― Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban

“I started learning English from Abuelo Jorge's old grammar textbooks. I found them in Abuelo Celia's closet. They date back to 1919, the first year he started working for the American Electric Broom Company. At school, only a few students were allowed to learn English, by special permission. The rest of us had to learn Russian. I liked the curves of the Cyrillic letters, their unexpected sounds. I liked the way my name looked: Иван. I took Russian for nearly two years at school. My teacher, Sergey Mikoyan, praised me highly. He said I had an ear for languages, that if I studied hard I could be a translator for world leaders. It was true I could repeat anything he said, even tongue twisters like kolokololiteyshchiki perekolotili vikarabkavshihsya vihuholey "the church bell casters slaughtered the desmans that had scrambled out." He told me I had a gift, like playing the violin, or mastering chess.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Mírame, miénteme, pégame, mátame si quieres
Pero no me dejes. No, no me dejes, nunca jamás …”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“Inés de Bobadilla, Cuba’s first woman governor,”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“His projects conduct electricity, engage motion with toothed wheels, react in concert with universal laws of physics.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban