How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
She gains faith as she says each word, and dares further: "World... squirrel... rough... tough... love... enough..." [...] Yo continues: "Doc, rock, smock, luck," so many words. There is no end to what can be said about the world. (1.4.172-173)
How do we know Yolanda is getting better? She's able to start writing again. (Hooray!) Words have meaning again, and Yolanda feels confident about using them to describe the world around her.
Quote #8
It was the first pornographic poem I'd ever co-written; of course I didn't know it was pornographic until Rudy explained to me all the word plays and double meanings. [...] That anyone should put all of this into a poem, a place I'd reserved for deep feelings and lofty sentiments! (1.5.17)
Whoa. You mean poetry can be about sex? We're going to have to look into this. But seriously, Yoyo's experience with Rudy teaches us that sometimes, literature can have two meanings at the same time. And in order to understand all of its meanings, it requires interpretation, which is kind of like code-breaking. We read this paragraph as a license to go around interpreting our socks off.
Quote #9
That night, at last, she started to write, recklessly, three, five pages, looking up once only to see her father passing by the hall on tiptoe. When Yoyo was done, she read over her words, and her eyes filled. She finally sounded like herself in English! (2.2.40)
Ah, yes, the elusive breakthrough. Writer's block is the worst. We think it's a key moment when Yoyo says she "sounded like herself" in English. Earlier, we saw how an adult Yolanda didn't feel like she sounded like herself in Spanish anymore. Bilingualism seems really fluid in this novel—sometimes Yolanda feels more fluent as an English-speaker, and other times more fluent as a Spanish-speaker.