How we cite our quotes: ("Abbreviated chapter name," page)
Quote #7
"Memory cannot be confined, Celia realizes, looking out the kitchen window to the sea. It's slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. Capturing images suddenly seems to her an act of cruelty. It was an atrocity to sell cameras at El Encanto department store, to imprison emotions on squares of glossy paper." ("Palmas Street," 47-48)
We love the ambiguity of that second sentence, where it's either the sea or memory that is "slate gray." Let your mind play with the possibilities of those interpretations. Celia has a unique stance on the act of "fixing memory," and feels that the beauty of recollection lies in the ability interpret and rearrange the original experience at will.
Quote #8
"'Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths,' Felicia whispers in her son's ear. Nobody else teaches him that." ("Fire," 88)
Felicia may be in one of her hallucinatory stages, but this little bit of madness has wisdom in it. In either case (memory or imagination) the event or "truth" relies on the transformative power of the mind to give it meaning. In other words, whatever "really" happened in the past doesn't matter—it's how we choose to reassemble the memory that counts.
Quote #9
"All summer, it seems to her...she has lived in her memories. Sometimes she'll glimpse the hour on a dusty Canada Dry clock, or look at the sun low in the sky, and realize she cannot account for her time. Where do the hours go? Her past, she fears, is eclipsing her present." ("Fire," 92)
Celia does something that most older people do: reviews her life and continuously tries to find out what was important in it. Although it is a natural response to aging, we can see that it bothers her a bit here. The real problem may not be that the past is encroaching on the present. For Celia, the big question is whether or not the past will allow her to have a future.