Rosario Ferré on Puerto Rico

“This is very typical of Puerto Rican culture and of all Latin men. Women are either the Madonna or the whore. It's very difficult for them to have an idea of a woman who is neither, or perhaps both.”

“In Puerto Rico the sixties arrived four years late-in a colony everything gets there a little late. So from 1968 to 1972 we were right in the middle of all that. Drugs, marijuana, rebellion. Everybody wore long hair.”

“When it really got bad in Puerto Rico was in the 1930s, when these big, absentee-owned corporations were dominating the scene. They weren't just Americans; some of them were Puerto Ricans. Sugar processing ceased to be under small ownership and became incorporated into mega-enterprises.”

“Puerto Rico, like all the countries of the Caribbean, is a nation where fantastic reality, the world of magic, is ever present. There are various sects of white magic, such as Santeria. It is a reality that is very palpable in our environment, and this is why there are no great differences between fantasy and reality...All Caribbean writers have this in common.”

“The Puerto Rican ethos, or character, is precisely defined by its undefinition. We are always trying to define ourselves and never get there; but it is part of our definition that we keep looking. It's like Diogenes, who was always looking for truth with his lamp; and although he never found what he was looking for, the important thing was that he kept on looking.”