15 Quotes by Giannina Braschi

Don’t get me wrong. A thinker thought, maybe it was Ortega y Gasset, that a country is in decadence when the parts no longer want to be part of the totality. It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Spain, it will happen in the States.

We can’t be ambassadors because we don’t have a country. Puerto Rico is not a country with any power in the world, I won’t be considered a great poet. Spain created great poets with its empire and made them known around the world through its empire. Great poetry has always stemmed from the economic prosperity of a people. That is why we have Quevedo and Gongora.

We were fighting for them in wars against people that we had more in common with than with the United States of Banana.

Questions don’t change the truth. But they give it motion.

If you want to know what love is, have a child. If you want to know what pain is, bury him.

Ambulances always come with clouds of smoke. And then they disappear in a whistle. But what they bring is fear. Not freedom. Feardom is what they bring. And they bring fire and smoke. Oh, my nerves are bad tonight, yes, bad. I fear freedom. I, above all, fear the freedom that is above all feardom.

Only what is fated to die is capable of living. Only what dies lives.

Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.

What is liberty? The measure of dignity.