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21 " Jan-Peter offered to teach me the language of Amsterdam's red light district. ...But after his first phrase--'Using the back door will cost you double'--I withdrew my request. "
― Cristina García , Dreams of Significant Girls
22 " You never knew what to expect with Ingrid. One minute she could be sawing the locks off Pierpont's freezers; the next, providing shelter for the homeless birds of Switzerland. "
23 " Aura is convinced that the entire country has succumbed to a collective amnesia. This is what happened in a society, where no one is permitted to grow old slowly. Nobody talks of the past, for fear their wounds might reopen. Privately though, their wounds never heal. "
― Cristina García , The Lady Matador's Hotel
24 " ...No small amount of schadenfreude. Do you know what that means?""Dad, it's the lifeline of gossip. Of course I know what it means. "
25 " Would you mind taking off your shirt? "
26 " To live your life even half right seems extraordinary. "
27 " I still love you, Gustavo, but it's a habitual love, a wound in the knee that predicts rain. "
― Cristina García , Dreaming in Cuban
28 " Felicia stayed on the fringe of life because it was free of everyday malice. It was more dignified there. "
29 " 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. "
30 " Solitude, Celia realizes now, exists for us not to remember but to forget. "
31 " The salesmen bought me perfume and invited me to lunch. But they couldn't talk to me about why families of guajiros slept in the city's parks under flashing Coca-Cola signs. Those men only murmured sweet nonsense to me, trying in vain to flatter me. "
― Cristina García
32 " 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. "
33 " 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? "
34 " 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. "
35 " To survive is an act of hope. "
36 " I become convinced that you have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it. "
37 " Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present. "
38 " Who chooses what we know or what's important? I know I have to decide these things for myself. "
39 " Perhaps only this: that the greatest danger in life is certainty. Yes, I do believe that. Our last redoubt in the world is wonder. Wonder and unknowing. Now and then a random detail will stir me to faint recognitions: a row of dead beetles in the grass; the chapped knees of some dowager on the S-bahn. Tantalizing signs reminding me that infinity billows out from every moment. That's when I lean in, sniff the air, cock my ears like a foxhound- and listen. "
― Cristina García , Here in Berlin
40 " What more do you need? Poetry? Poetry is in the living. Little Sister, in the dreaming. Nobody in the world can teach you that. "