“...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.”

“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.”

“Those who speak know nothing. Those who know are silent.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”