“Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks.”

“The InfiniteIt was always dear to me, this solitary hill,and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,from so much of the ultimate horizon.But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,I create interminable spaces,greater than human silences, and deepestquiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,I go on to compare that infinite silencewith this voice, and I remember the eternaland the dead seasons, and the living present,and its sound, so that in this immensitymy thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweetto me in this sea.”

“And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber.”

“I am a shipwrecked man who fears every sea.”

“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.”

“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?”