Violeta [English Edition]: A Novel

No one gives you anything in life, Teresa would say, you have to take it by force, and as soon as you get careless they’ll take it back.

prosaic

He said that tools and manual labor were the common language of men and that there were no barriers to communication when two men worked side by side.

Her eternal illness is the reason for my good health; in order to avoid following in her footsteps, I’ve lived my life proudly ignoring any and all ailments. That’s how I learned that, in general, things clear up on their own.

implacable,

The journey of life has long and tedious stretches, step by step, day by day, without anything exciting happening, but memory is made up of the unexpected events that mark your course.

According to the poem by Antonio Machado, “there is no road, the road is made by walking,” but in my case it felt more like I was stumbling down narrow, winding paths that were often swallowed up by vegetation.

The rural women taught me that courage is contagious and that there’s strength in numbers; what you can’t do on your own can be achieved together, the more the better.

No nation had wanted to report the true number of deaths. Only Spain, who had remained neutral in the conflict, shared news of the illness, which is why it ended up being called the Spanish influenza.