Cristina Garcia Quotes & Sayings

It seemed to him that life's true tragedy was to lift up one's voice among the living and be met with indifference. — Cristina Garcia

I've started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There's a magic here working its way through my veins. There's something about the vegetation, too, that I respond to instinctively - the stunning bougainvillea, the flamboyants and jacarandas, the orchids growing from the trunks of the mysterious ceiba trees. And I love Havana, its noise and decay and painted ladyness. I could happily sit on one of those wrought-iron balconies for days, or keep my grandmother company on her porch, with its ringside view of the sea. I'm afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I'd have to return to New York. I know now it's where I belong - not instead of here, but more than here. How can I tell my grandmother this? — Cristina Garcia

She wonders if memory is little more than this: a series of erasure and perfected selections. — Cristina Garcia

To live your life even half right seems extraordinary. — Cristina Garcia

You have to live in the world to say anything meaningful about it. — Cristina Garcia

Mirrors are for misery, nothing more ... they record decay. — Cristina Garcia

I wish I could live underwater. Maybe then my skin would absorb the sea's consoling silence. — Cristina Garcia

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 Garcia

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. — Cristina Garcia

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? — Cristina Garcia

Would you mind taking off your shirt? — Cristina Garcia

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. — Cristina Garcia

Before you know it you'll be my age telling your own granddaughter the story of your life and you wanna make it an interesting one, don't you? You wanna be able to tell her some adventures, some excitements, some something. How you live your life, little one, is a gift for those who come after you, a kind of inheritance. — Cristina Garcia

Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent. — Cristina Garcia

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. — Cristina Garcia

I've been wondering lately whether fear is necessary for survival, whether it sharpens the senses during storms of uncertainity. Or is it, as I suspect, merely another variant of weakness? — Cristina Garcia

Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet. — Cristina Garcia

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 Garcia

Nobody is ready for death. If you ask Joe Blow on the street, he aint gonna tell you he thinks he'll live forever. But when the end is near you'll realize you've been believing that all along. It's like getting caught with your pants down. That's why you gotta live, little one. Yeah stop and smell them roses. — Cristina Garcia

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 Garcia