Mayra Padilla > Mayra's Quotes

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Nothing more exhilarating ... than saving yourself by the simple act of waking.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Crónica de una muerte anunciada

“También el amor se aprende”
― Gabriel García Marquez, Cronaca di una morte annunciata

“She felt the abyss of disenchantment.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."

[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]”
― Junot Diaz

“This is what I know: people's hopes go on forever.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“I can't seem to stay out of my own way.”
― Gloria Anzaldua

“Do work that matters. Vale la pena”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“I change myself, I change the world.”
― Gloria Anzaldua

“I am mad - but I choose this madness.”
― Gloria Anzaldua

“A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.”
― Gloria E. Anzaldúa

“Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

“Though we tremble before uncertain futures
may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength
may we dance in the face of our fears.
”
― Gloria Anzaldúa

“[HAMILTON]
I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda

“I'm still learning to love the parts of me that no one claps for.”
― Rudy Francisco

“To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it’s over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that’s rare, señor. That’s rare and valuable.”

— Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Short Stories ”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway