The Stories Of Eva Luna Quotes
"For five centavos she delivered verses from memory; for seven she improved the quality of dreams; for nine she wrote love letters; for twelve she invented insults for irreconcilable enemies."
"Belisa Crepusculario had been born into a family so poor they did not even have names to give their children."
"She made a quick assessment of her situation and concluded that aside from becoming a prostitute or working as a servant in the kitchens of the rich there were few occupations she was qualified for."
"She read the speech aloud. She read it three times, so her client could engrave it on his memory."
"If truth were known, as the years went by, the memory of those light bones, that childish hand on his belly, that baby tongue in his mouth, grew to be an obsession."
"Clarisa was born before the city had electricity, she lived to see the television coverage of the first astronaut levitating on the moon, and she died of amazement when the Pope came for a visit and was met in the street by homosexuals dressed up as nuns."
"The pendulum swings back and forth with inexorable precision, she said."
"She began to treat her like a daughter who had gone wrong, with a brusque authority that barely veiled her tenderness."
"How will you pay if you lose?" Riad Halabí wanted to know.
"I have a house in the capital; if I lose, Vargas will have the title tomorrow."
"All right, Vargas; the time has come to dig up your treasure," he said when the spectators’ excitement had died down.
"I swear, Lieutenant, I don’t know anything about this; they stole it, they stole my treasure!" and he burst out crying like a widow woman.
"Pig! I’ll get my money. On your mother’s grave, I’ll get my money!"
"He almost never left me hungry," she would tell the guard in an apologetic tone.
"What do you think an educated man like him, a doctor, the head of the hospital and hero of the nation, gets from the chatter of an old woman and the silence of her granddaughter?" the town gossips used to ask each other.
"I have seen men of great courage die this way."
"I had learned that sometimes death is more powerful than love."
"If a naked Indian saved Negro Rivas, I will save Ester Lucero, even if it means making a pact with the devil."
"Simple María believed in love. That was what made her a living legend."
"Fear is stronger than desire, than love or hatred or guilt or rage, stronger than loyalty. Fear is all-consuming."
"The only bait he had been able to think of was Juana la Triste."
"I’ve been waiting all these years; I knew he would come sooner or later. He’s the man with the mangoes."
"Because you are the person I love most in this world, and because you should have been the father of my son."
"An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, Turk. Isn’t that what your religion teaches?"
"I see that the Little Sisters have looked after you well, Analía."
"Radiance of spirit was all that really mattered; that was the only thing that survived the passage of time without deteriorating."
"The correspondence between Analía and Luis Torres lasted two years, at the end of which the girl had a hatbox filled with letters and a heart lost beyond recall."
"When he crushed her between the embroidered sheets of a too-soft bed, she knew that she had fallen in love with a ghost."
"She taught her son the rudiments of writing and arithmetic and tried to direct him toward a taste for books."
"One night she dreamed of being caressed by a repulsive man with black ink-stained fingers."
"I don’t want to know anything about it. In any case, I think that you and the boy would be much better off in the capital."
"I shall stay here. My son will stay with me, because I need his help around the place."
"She began by burning the sheets she had shared with her husband and moving her narrow cot into the main bedroom."