The Great Divide Quotes

“A woman should have no need for a man. Millicent could sit by the sea and hold her own hand, she supposed. It was why she had two.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“There were times she longed to be different, but she guessed everyone felt that way at one time or another, and so in wanting to be different, everyone was the same.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“Ada had always believed that her mother, in rebuilding the house only three miles from where it had once been, had kept her world piteously small, but maybe what mattered, Ada thought as she gazed at it now, was not how big or how small her mother's world was, but that her mother had managed to keep it at all. It must have been no trifling thing to carve out a space of her own, to protect it and hold within it the people she loved.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“Ada had asked, "But is it what you prefer?" The question had nearly made Marian cry. It was so rare that someone asked for her preference, so rare that she had a say in her own life anymore. Years ago, John had walked into her world and cast a shadow over her. To everyone, he was more important than she was, more intelligent, more interesting. That would always be true. And the knowledge of that, her place in his shadow, had darkened something in her. "No it isn't," she had said, and Ada had opened the drapes. Just like that, light had streamed in.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“Sadly it seems the North Americans do not understand that. To them, we know nothing and have nothing--nothing worth knowing or having, as far as they are concerned. I have heard them say that the work they are planning will bring things like progress and civilization and modernity to this place--I am sure you have heard those words as well--as if the tools we have already created, the buildings we have already constructed, the land we have already cultivated, the society we have already organized is not, somehow progress or civilization or modernity, but outside of those things. As if we are nothing more than primitive people with a few primitive huts that can be so easily moved.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“A little more than two years after that day, Lucille would leave the Camby estate. When she did, her first child, Millicent, was one year old, and her second, Ada, was only a few weeks in the world. Just as her mother had not wanted her to know a life confined to the fields, Lucille did not want her daughters to know a life confined to the estate. That time had come to an end. She wanted to give them more. She would take the house, the one that had served the Bunting family for so many decades, with her when she went. Henry Camby would declare that the house belonged to Lucille by virtue of heritage, a rationale that no one on the Camby estate had ever heard invoked—and one that would never be invoked again.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“Perhaps the problem, he thought, was that a person needed faith to be able to see things that did not exist, to imagine a world not yet made. In addition to so many other things, Francisco had lost his faith a long time ago.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“West 13th Street! No Panamanian would have given this street that name. It was so... bland. Scrubbed spotlessly clean. Disconnected entirely from the history of what this area for so long had been, which, yes, yes, was poor and smelled to high heaven, but that is what it was. That was the truth.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“I was born here, in the Americas. Therefore, I am an American... We were Americans long before you were.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“Why could he not retrain his thoughts and be a different sort of man, free of the darkness in the pit of his soul? Let the seed wither. Let the bat fly away. Why could he not root it out once and for all?”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“To be independent and to be sovereign were two different things.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“It was possible, Francisco would think later, that every human being only gets a certain allotment of joy and theirs had come in a windfall, the entirety of it used up across those nine glorious months.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“Officially unchained,” her mother said at the end of the story, “but tethered just the same.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“repeated his”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“It was easier, Francisco had learned, to live in a world of delusion, which was after all not so different from hope, than to stand face-to-face with the truth.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide

“He said, “Why, we sailed to a swamp!” John nodded. “That’s right. And we shall clean it all up.”
― Cristina Henríquez, The Great Divide