Patricia Engel Quotes & Sayings

You don't 'find' love, mi amor. You choose it. And then to keep love, you must choose it again, day after day. — Patricia Engel

I think of my mother and how, when I was a child, she'd take me into the water with her and I felt time suspended in her embrace. How badly I've wanted to return to those moments. We remained under the same roof, but the years pulled us apart, so we could never recover the softness I felt from her under the sun, amid the waves.

Here, in the open ocean, with nobody to hold me at the surface but myself, I become sad for what's become of my mother and me, the ways life hardened us to one another. — Patricia Engel

There is not an animal on this earth that if given the choice between freedom or captivity, would not choose to be free. — Patricia Engel

In the old house in Miami, I'd wake with the feeling of a hand on my chest, my eyes open to the murky blue half-light of my bedroom. Everything quiet, though still feeling noise all around me, though my ears, behind my eyes, under my skin.

In the cottage, I fall asleep slowly, counting the sounds of the night animals - crickets, frogs, squealing raccoons, a cat in heat somewhere beyond the coco plum trees.

But mine is still a loneliness that shakes me from my sleep.

I can forget my solitude all day, through my working hours, through errands, the evening housecleaning ritual I've made up for the cottage.

Yet night remains a tomb, when I'm most vulnerable, lying down for rest without distraction.

Only this body and that darkness, the whispers of the never-ending noche:

You belong to no one. No one belongs to you. — Patricia Engel

There's not one living thing on this planet that doesn't scream to survive." I — Patricia Engel

Five days later, I'm on the same journey, edging down the turnpike with the scrim of sunset lowering in the west, passing through Florida City, strip malls and car dealerships, melting into swampland and fishing tackle shops, past Manatee Bay onto the Overseas Highway. It's drifter territory, where people go to forget and to be forgotten. I've come to think of this land as a second home. The prison motel; the familiar faces though few of us have exchanged names. Each of us serving our sentence, waiting, waiting, because prison has made us more patient than we ever knew we could be, until we get the call that it's time; the end of the sentence, or just the end. — Patricia Engel

I held Carlito's hands in mine, my fingers wedged between the cuffs and his wrists because I hoped that at least for a moment he would feel me and not the cold metal against his skin. Those are things to which he'd become too accustomed. I saw it in his posture. The way the years of walking with his hands chained to his waist, his ankles shackled together by leg irons, had sloped his spine, causing him to walk with his head tilted down, in short steps, so different from the way he moved when he was free, with rhythm in his gait, a walk more like a glide — Patricia Engel

So, what's the secret of life?
You don't know? It's so simple.
I shake my head.
Love. — Patricia Engel

Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it's the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: 'It doesn't have to be violent for it to be torture. — Patricia Engel

...books give a man ideas, they make him want to live. — Patricia Engel

...the only thing people resent more than poor immigrants are wealthy ones — Patricia Engel

There was a time when we dreamed of returning there to live, Mami, Carlito, and me. We idealized Cartagena all year long as Mami saved up for our summer trips, but when we got there, it was never the way we wanted it to be - too hot, too rainy, too full of pueblo chisme, too grim, too hopeless. Still, during our prison visits, Carlito liked to conjure stories from the Cartagena of our nostalgia and made me swear that if he never got the chance to go back, I'd go for him. — Patricia Engel

This is Florida, where they're cool about putting people to death — Patricia Engel

My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she'd learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother's hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free. — Patricia Engel

We're both of the invented Caribbean, Nesto says, a Nuevo Mundo alchemy of distilled African, Spaniard, Indian, Asian, and Arab blood, each of us in varying mixtures. He likes to compare our complexions, putting his arm next to mine, calls me 'canelita, ni muy tostada ni muy blanquita' showing off his darkness, proof, his mother told him, of his noble Yoruba parentage and brave cimarron ancestors, la raza prieta of which he should be proud no matter how much others have resisted mestizaje, hanging onto the milky whiteness of their lineage like it's their most precious commodity. — Patricia Engel

Something I've never admitted: I was the one who told Carlito about Isabela's cheating when he was beer-drunk in front of the TV one Saturday afternoon, wondering why she took so long to return his calls.

I pumped him full of rage, told him she was giving him horns, that he was letting her play him like some kind of cabron.

I lied.

Said everybody in town knew about her easy ways but him. — Patricia Engel

Asks me what I do for a living, and I think, I'm only twenty-two. I don't do anything for a living except smoke cigarettes and throw my heart around. — Patricia Engel

We didn't yet know about undertows and rip currents, the many ways the ocean can turn on you. — Patricia Engel

The only way to get what we want from life is to ask for it." I — Patricia Engel

We can't be both human and divine. To be human is to be imperfect." When — Patricia Engel

The Everglades are on fire on my final drive down to the Keys. On the curve of the turnpike where the pineapple groves end and marshland begins, I watch the green horizon burn with helicopters bobbing overhead, fighting the flames. It's too late in the season to be a wildfire. The radio says some thrill-torcher is responsible.

I don't believe in omens. I believe we choose our own signs, so I take this one as my own: with this blaze, I leave my old life up here on the mainland in ashes. — Patricia Engel

I'd only marry for love."
"Easy to say when you're not illegal. — Patricia Engel

When we hang up, I sigh long and look out the window to the darkness over the ocean, no delineation between water and sky. It's always disorienting when I speak to my mother, that pull of her voice back into our old life even though both of us have tried to move beyond it.

In her soft Caribbean accent I hear my brother's laughter, see us both as children playing together in the backyard when it was still covered in crunch green grass and our toys were new.

Mami's voice was the song of our home, even with no father, even as we lived with that black mass of the unspoken, even with the marks on our bones we didn't know we carried.

Through all life's uncertainty, we felt anchored by the love in her voice. — Patricia Engel

It's a sea of death," Universo said. "But the water remembers what civilization tries to forget. — Patricia Engel

Mami had no choice but to tell Carlito and me the real story that same night.

In a way, I always knew something like that had happened. It was the only way to explain why my older brother got such special treatment his whole life - everyone scared to demand that he go to school, that he study, that he have better manners, that he stop pushing me around.

El Pobrecito is what everyone called him, and I always wondered why.

I was two years younger and nobody, and I mean nadie, paid me any mind, which is why, when our mother told me the story of our father trying to kill his son like we were people out of the Bible, part of me wished our papi had thrown me off that bridge instead. — Patricia Engel

Again, I think of Carlito. The years I tried to serve his sentence with him, and how he let me. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I hoped that he'd see in my eyes how I'd stopped living for anything and anyone but him, and that he would tell me not to come back. — Patricia Engel

What's wrong with you?' he sounded desperate to understand. 'I take you to a zoo of psychos and you're trying to make friends like some kind of bobita? You're going to get yourself killed one day, Reina.'

I was quiet, but I knew he was wrong, and that it was just the opposite. Making friends with danger is the only way to survive. — Patricia Engel