I can see myself watching him shave every morning. And at other time I see us in that house and see how one bright day (or a day like this, so cold your mind shifts every time the wind does) he will wake up and decide it's all wrong. I'm sorry, he'll say. I have to leave now.

When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level. Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see. Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong.

You don't want to let go, but don't want to be hurt, either. It's not a great place to be but what can I tell you?

You said i could call you when i wanted but that you wouldn’t call me. you have to decide where and when, you said. if you leave it up to me i’ll want to see you every day. At least you were honest, which is more than i can say for me.

You can't find intimacy - you can't find home - when you're always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else. You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt and misunderstood.

[Donald] Trump is explained with the intersection of a number of things: our economic crisis, the way it's easier to blame immigrants, with the happenstance that he discovered that by bashing Latino immigrants and characterizing them as "rapists" and "murderers" and "scumbags," suddenly he's got this groundswell of support from a group of people who were raised on this vocabulary.