Caramelo Quotes
"The gaudier the better, says the Awful Grandmother. No use taking anything of value to that town of Indians."
"Each summer it's something unbelievable that sells like hot queques."
"The bosses at the L. L. Fish Furniture Company on South Ashland have begun to dock the three because they arrive sixteen minutes after the hour, forty-three minutes, fifty-two, instead of on time."
"We pick up our hammers and say, 'Hell you… Get outta… Full of sheet'."
"Sweets sweeter, colors brighter, the bitter more bitter."
"A balloon painted with wavy pink stripes wearing a paper hat."
"It's because Aunty Ninfa is from Italy, that's why she's used to fancy things."
"Aunty Light-Skin wears metallic thread cocktail dresses to work, tight skirts with a kick pleat in the back and matching bolero jackets with cloth buttons."
"She likes to carry me and pretend she is my mama."
"I'm rushed to the outdoor sink, my scalp scrubbed raw with black soap till my crying makes Mother stop."
"A candle consumes itself from so much burning."
"Would you rather get dressed and come and have breakfast, or shall I bring you a tray?"
"How can I tell Father they frighten me? They always talk too loud, as if everything they say is funny."
"I sleep. And it makes me so huuuun-gry. Then I eat. And it makes me so sleeeee-py!"
"The Grandmother is too busy supervising the tables and chairs being carried out to the courtyard."
"What a silly you are, Private Lala! No need to cry because of a plate of mole."
"I suppose that's how Mexicans love, I suppose."
"I leave the Grandfather and the caramelo rebozo, and run slamming doors behind me."
"I remember how to answer the way the Grandmother instructed."
"—PRETTY BABY OF MINE, OF MINE. PRETTY BABY OF MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINE!"
"The bodies below moving and twirling like bits of colored glass in a kaleidoscope."
"The music and the spirals of cigarette smoke rising up like genies."
"The man’s hand leading a woman when they dance, just a little tug."
"The water's warm, but the waves wash sand inside my bathing suit and scratch my bottom raw."
"The ocean bottom is ridged like the roof of a mouth and disappears beneath your feet sometimes when you least expect it."
"—I can do what I choose if she doesn’t notice I’m gone too long."
"—Well, good day. May things go well for you."
"It’s dizzying to decide one’s fate, because, to tell the truth, she’d never made any decision regarding her own life."
"—She’s crying over some flower she says she lost."
"Soledad leaned over the balustrade to watch Narciso skip down the stone steps."
"But it was Regina’s 'little commerce' that enabled them to keep the apartment."
"But the worst thing was Señora Regina’s kindness."
"After crying the room was still there with the clubfoot door."
"Because a life contains a multitude of stories and not a single strand explains precisely the who of who one is..."
"Back in Señora Regina’s times, however, it was sometimes necessary in the season of rain to hire someone like her father..."
"Pobrecita Señora Regina. She had not married for love."
"To tell the truth, she loved and still loved this Santos Piedrasanta."
"How Regina had broken the Judas-maker’s heart when she ran off and married the Spaniard."
"And to see his mother chattering so animatedly, so stupidly, so childishly about a ghost who had once and long ago knocked out her tooth..."
"When Regina first met her husband he was already old."
"Sometimes before nightfall, after everyone was through shouting for me to do this or that or who knows what, well, there I would be, on the rooftop watching the lights of the town opening like the night sky."
"Because I wasn’t bad, understand? I’d never been bad to anyone really."
"Because you have no idea what it was like to live with my Aunty Fina and her sixteen creatures."
"It would be untrue to say everyone lived happily ever after, because ever after is very long and happiness rather on the short side."
"The world was filled with wind the day Narciso Reyes met Exaltación Henestrosa."
"It’s almost as if being the tragic hero is a poetic indulgence, a public penance, a luminous grief."
"To make love one must use this, she said, tapping her heart —and that can’t be taught."
"She wished she could boil a washtub of water to shower on them all and cleanse them from her sea of troubles."
"She watched with disgust the widow walk to and from church in her lascivious black garments sashaying her fat cow’s behind."
"Her refuge was a room across the zócalo Narciso had found for her in a colonial building that was once a convent and now a boardinghouse."
"God had been kind and bestowed an aura of melancholia about Inocencio Reyes."
"When the labor began she felt her body lurch forward of its own accord like a piece of machinery, like a chariot, like a wild horse."
"His life makes a wonderful story and was adapted into that unforgettable film."
"Remember our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Nezahualcóyotl, the poet king?"
"He was simply a boy without the words for what he was feeling, someone who felt most comfortable in the company of his own thoughts."
"It was better to have a gallant past, because it made one’s present circumstance seem all the more wretched and allowed one the liberty of looking down condescendingly on one’s neighbors."
"To make matters even more comic, he was wearing a top hat."
"Sadness was gathering where it always gathered, first in the tip of the nose, and then in the eyes and throat."
"The holding tank. The Chicago police station, Homan and Harrison. Lights bright and blazing like a supermarket."
"She did not call out to her husband, nor to God, la Virgen, or a saint."
"The secret was this. Pánfila sang con ganas, as they say. With feeling."
"Ni contigo ni sin ti—Neither with you nor without you..."
"The silence like an answer. The silence an answer."
"Women wearing hair snoods, silk flowers bought at the five-and-dime bobby-pinned behind one ear like Billie Holiday."
"A pink blouse with rhinestones and pearls sewn around the collar."
"First you put a rat in, and comb the hair over it like this."
"She couldn’t admit that she still telephoned, would hang up before anyone answered."
"She had taken to writing the name beside her own a thousand times in ballpoint pen."
"Because with you, you’d kill me. Because without you, I’d die."
"Something like this happened to Zoila Reyna when she met Enrique Aragón."
"I am the favorite child of a favorite child. I know my worth."
"You couldn’t get me to sing that corny old song if you paid me."
"Father carried me wherever he went. I was a little fist."
"Father bought me crinolines, and taffeta dresses, and ribbons, and socks."
"He also learned to change my diapers, which he had never done for his sons."
"I was worn on the arm like a jewel, like a bouquet of flowers, like the Infant of Prague."
"Celaya, the seventh child. Celaya, my father’s Waterloo."
"How could Father say I’m like her! Even she admits I take after him."
"Why is it sadness always comes and gets you when you lie down?"
"Maybe it's because we talk too much in the day, and we can't hear what the heart is saying."
"I know he's my husband, pero me da asco, he disgusts me. Help me to forgive him."
"You can always tell when a man has a naked woman lying next to him."
"Everyone knew how the story was going to end except me."
"Friends? What do you think I am, una gringa?"
"Loneliness is one thing. I know about loneliness. But los celos, Lalita, for that there's no cure."
"It's important to remember your dreams, Lala."
"God, if there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s chilangos. And the familia Reyes. And Mexicans."
"You want a good life, make sure you’re adored. Adored, you hear me? Everything else is crap."
"The family comes first—la familia. Only your family is going to love you when you’re in trouble."
"My things, my things. You understand, don’t you, Lala? You see? You see what happens?"
"Listen, you want a good life, make sure you’re adored. Adored, you hear me? Everything else is crap."
"We’re thirsty, thirsty. We’re salt water and sweet."
"The universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven."
"Life’s like that. My Got! What a telenovela our lives are!"
"I could never draw myself without drawing the others."
"You’re the author of the telenovela of your life."
"To mention them makes our family look like sinvergüenzas."
"Don’t be talking such things like the barbarians, mi vida."