Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.

As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

The smooth folds of her dress concealed a tumultuous heart, and her modest lips told nothing of her torment. She was in love.

An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

Financial demands, of all the rough winds that blow upon our love, (are) quite the coldest and the most biting.

And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.

I'm not just going to love you, I'm going to love every version of you, everything you will become, everything you will grow and change into.

You are a seed

I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives

My clothes are predominately black and my home is predominantly white.

A fig for partridges and quails, ye dainties I know nothing of ye; But on the highest mount in Wales Would choose in peace to drink my coffee.

I don't need it to be easy. I just want it to be worth it.

I want to be someone making music/with my coming.

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.

Through personal prayer, through family prayer, by trusting in God with faith, nothing wavering, we can call down to our rescue His mighty power.