Quotations from *Bloodsong*, 1 of 2
Jill Neimark
American

“I wanted to cut my life off like a bad arm, and I did, and Christ I was proud of myself, but you know how they say an amputated arm aches? Well, I ached for my old life. I always seem to be aching for something.”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Everyone has a first and then a last love, he wrote, and it’s the last love that stamps the soul. The first is simple, it’s a flying leap into life. The last must be Gordian in its knot, it permeates every memory, seeps into every pore; counterpoint to fate. It becomes fate. And so the last love is always a shock and an exception. She might be his last love.

“But I’m not gonna fuck you,” she’d retort.

“I don’t need that now.”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Y poco a poco me olvide de vivir,” he said. And little by little I forgot how to live.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Virgins, bulls, men and gods; the world must be made to bleed.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

And Nadal said those who have endured some misfortune will always be set apart by it. They can follow the call of that misfortune, they can seed affliction in others, until they are so alone that no one can reach them.

But it is that same misfortune that is their gift, and their bridge back to humanity. They must make their way back. He’d tried to make his way back through love. In a tin hut in La Perla on a sunny afternoon he knew he could not.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

Quotations from *Bloodsong*, 2 of 2
Jill Neimark
American

He never asked my last name. When I asked if he’d ever been in love, he said, Yes, but I loved the wrong person, and he said it as simply as someone would say, Yes, but I took the wrong turn and that’s why I’m late. I wanted to ask the most stupid, obvious question: Why did you choose the wrong person? But instead I asked him how he liked New York, and he said, I’ve been in New York before and I can tell you, New York and I are not in love with each other. I like the desert and the ocean.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

On a train to Wyoming. It’s surprising how we’re all alike at least on trains.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

I’m twenty-nine and I feel absent from my own life.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

I don’t remember—what’s it like to be the most important person to someone? To say, I’ll never get over you. I’ll never recover.
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong

“Every puertorriqueno,” says Popi, “is born split in two. He’s like the yagrumo, the tree whose leaves turn from dark to light in the wind. Every one of us is born with this divided self.”

“Divided between what?” I ask, watching him pour milk into his coffee until it’s the color of butterscotch.

“Latin and Anglo,” he says quickly, as if pleased at my indulgence. “Being part American and always the poor cousin. . .”
—Jill Neimark, Bloodsong