Julia Alvarez Quotes (1950-)

“I remember the whirr and whine of her black Singer, the gold traceries on the cast iron rod by the wheel that lifted and lowered the needle. Threading, eyepieces, winding the turquoise string through hooks, around miniscule wheels, up and down, her Ariadne hands clever in labyrinths,..”

“[M]y auntie, Tití, who was the reader in the family, gave me a picture book version of “The Arabian Nights,” and I was smitten. Scheherazade, the young heroine, was a girl who looked Dominican, dark eyed, dark hair, olive skin. Then, the whole idea of a girl saving her life and that of all women in the kingdom and transforming a cruel sultan by telling stories. That book put a luminous bit of information in my head: that stories have power, that they can transform you and save you.”

“What a delight to discover that Ferré is as good a storyteller in English as in her native Spanish!”

“I love what the poet Stanley Kunitz said about dreaming of “an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.” That pretty much sums up what I most admire in a work of literature.”

“I have a bit of an obsession with Gilgamesh, the earliest surviving work of literature, which comes to us in fragments. Not that people should be surprised if I owned a copy or two by different translators, but I have a whole shelf of adaptations and translations. There’s something I find compelling about the story: what makes a human(e) being, what constitutes bravery, how do we deal with loss, the transformative possibilities of love. I first got hooked with Herbert Mason’s adaptation, then found David Ferry’s excellent translation, Yusef Komunyakaa’s verse play, Gardner/Maier’s translation, Stephen Mitchell’s poetic interpretation. There’s even a graphic novel version by Kent and Kevin Dixon. The fact that the story has survived this long in so many renditions means I’m not the only one captivated by this ancient story.”

“of the five collected novels, the one that hit home the hardest was Voyage in the Dark. Reading it was a painful voyage into my own cluelessness and powerlessness, a voyage that many young women of my generation, on the cusp of the women's movement, had embarked upon...Rhys's portrayals of young women who fall prey to rapacious situations, canaries in the mine shaft of patriarchy, smart girls with nowhere to go but the wrong man's arms or Anna Karenina's train tracks, spoke to many of us embarking on our journeys...by allowing her female characters a full range of feelings and not airbrushing them into simple virtuous victimhood, Rhys liberates us all from the danger of a single, monochrome self and story...That ability to imagine a life so intimately and richly is Jean Rhys's gift to us. For that she should have been knighted. Instead, I'd like to imagine her even rather happy (perhaps!) with what her stories have become: food to nourish all our souls.”

“The White House has disinvited the poets/to a cultural tea in honor of poetry/after the Secret Service got wind of a plot/to fill Mrs. Bush’s ears with anti-war verse./Were they afraid the poets might persuade/a sensitive girl who always loved to read,/a librarian who stocked the shelves with Poe/and Dickinson? Or was she herself afraid/to be swayed by the cooing doves, and live at odds/with the screaming hawks in her family?/The Latina maids are putting away the cups/and the silver spoons, sad to be missing out/on música they seldom get to hear/in the hallowed halls. . . The valet sighs/as he rolls the carpets up and dusts the blinds./Damn but a little Langston would be good/in this dreary mausoleum of a place!/Why does the White House have to be so white?/The chef from Baton Rouge is starved for verse/uncensored by Homeland Security./NO POETRY UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!/Instead the rooms are vacuumed and set up/for closed-door meetings planning an attack/against the ones who always bear the brunt/of silencing: the poor, the powerless,/the ones who serve, those bearing poems, not arms./So why be afraid of us, Mrs. Bush?/you’re married to a scarier fellow./We bring you tidings of great joy-/not only peace but poetry on earth.”

“In the worlds of film and television, cultural gringoism is almost pathetic. Mainsteam recognition of Chicano and Chicana homegrown authors did not begin until the discovery that the Raza world could be colorful, amusing, exotic, magical. Rarely was that world projected as full of anger at racism, struggles for justice or revolutions of the body and spirit by women as well as men. Now come the new books of Julia Alvarez and Demetria Martínez, both with radical political themes. They have garnered flattering reviews, but profound political or social questions raised in both books have gone ignored; most critics seem happier with the romancing...Julia Alvarez, now a professor at Middlebury College, was brought to the United States at age ten by her family to escape Trujillo's repression. After her first successful and lighter book, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez took up the challenging task of telling the story of the butterflies. Some Dominicans have berated the author for supposed errors. The book isn't perfect reading; it tells almost nothing about issues of class and color or the Afro-Dominican experience, for example. But the book remains a treasure, for Alvarez has told a story unknown to most people in this country and told it unforgettably. In her last message about the butterflies, the author says: "by making them myth, we lost the Mirabals once more, dismissing the challenge of their courage as impossible for us, ordinary men and women." This she seeks to correct by making them real people, whose courage is thus made real, too.”

“In writing about Margarita and Julia, I received a sign in the fall of 1986 that these poems were complete and ready to emerge. I met two women poets who have these names and who have had an impact in my life: Margaret Randall and Julia Álvarez.”