In The Time Of The Butterflies Love Quotes

834 Words4 Pages

Emily Sandrini Ms. Phelps World Lit 4 18 February 2023 In The Time Of The Butterflies Essay In the book In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, one of the main concepts of the book is love motivates people to fight, and this is best shown through the youngest Mirabal sister, Maria Teresa. When Maria Teresa meets her husband, Leandro, she becomes motivated to finally join the mariposas and help the revolution, which shows how love is a great motivator for many people. Love is a great motivator for many people, it can cause you to do things for other people you’d never expect you would do. In In The Time Of The Butterflies, Maria Teresa meets Leandro, an engineer who delivers weapons to Minerva and Manolo, a help to the revolution Minerva …show more content…

Maria Teresa loves Leandro more than anyone she has ever met, and she eventually marries him, wanting to stay with him forever and fight for him. “Maybe what I mean is, love is the deepest struggle” (Alvarez 139) This quote shows how Maria Teresa is willing to struggle for love. She’s waited many years to find true love, and when she meets Leandro he comes and goes, it is a struggle to be with him, but Maria Teresa knows it is true love. Leandro helps with the revolution, and he gets captured and taken to La Victoria where he’s imprisoned with all his friends for providing weapons for the revolution. Maria Teresa and Minerva are also imprisoned and tortured at La Victoria for helping with the revolution. This struggle is deep and traumatizes Maria Teresa and many other people who were also captured and imprisoned, but the thought of love and going back to their husbands is able to ground Maria Teresa and help her cope with the pain she is experiencing. “they’d threaten me with things they would do to me, to Leandro, to my family” (222) When …show more content…

While Maria Teresa is stuck in jail she becomes depressed, thinking of Leandro being kept in jail as well. “Then one day you are out of here, free, only to discover you’ve locked yourself up and thrown away the key somewhere too deep inside your heart to fish it out” (231) This shows how Maria Teresa is reluctant to see Leandro and love because she’s been traumatized so deeply, the thought of losing him after seeing him again is scarier than never seeing him again. Maria Teresa talks about how she feels connected to everyone in prison, all of the other revolutionaries kept in there fighting to be let go, most of them have a love to go home and find again, whether a child, partner, or friend, there is that hope motivating them, keeping them alive, and the love bonding them together that they form being kept there at the prison. “Sometimes I really feel it here, especially late at night, a current among us, like an invisible needle stitching us together into the glorious, free nation we are becoming” (239) This quote is important and shows the string, the current, attaching them and keeping them sane through all the torture and trauma they have to endure, all scared to go back home and find the person they love is lost and captured, but also still having the hope that their lovers are home, waiting for them, waiting to embrace and see them again. Love is a huge