Sandra Cisneros Quotes
-
I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
-
I have this great fear of Mexico City. I won't go to Mexico City unless someone meets me at the airport and is with me. I just feel very vulnerable there.
-
Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see.
-
Heartbreak makes us stronger; it's an opportunity for spiritual growth. How can you understand someone else's pain if you have not yourself suffered?
-
Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It's medicine, it's what you need at that time in your life.
-
I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.
-
Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.
-
My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.
-
One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I've ever spent.
-
I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.
-
When you edit, you imagine your enemy is seated on the other side of the table. Your enemy! And your enemy is going to read that with a viciousness, because he knows where you didn't work on it. He's going to shake it and really aim for that jugular. So you are going to polish, and revise, and rewrite, and cut out, and shape it, so that your enemy has no place to grip it. That's how you revise.
-
There DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping.
-
You can never have too much sky.
-
I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me.
-
We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.
-
Mexicans don't think of ghosts as haunting you.
-
One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.
-
Believe it or not, Mexican cooking, for those of you who have not gone farther south than Taco Bell, uses a lot of vegetables. But those vegetables were not brought here, like corn mushrooms, huitlacoche, or squash blossoms.
-
The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.
-
People paused to listen to Denise Chávez and she had them - with gum on her shoes, she had them. She said she stepped on gum when she came up to the stage and she couldn't move, so she had to stay in one spot otherwise people would see the Chiclet.
-
Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.
-
Marshall Rosenberg talks about how we can create peace in the communities we work with. He's been traveling to warring nations to create peace within those countries.
-
I don't like to go into subways, because I always see them mice. They are like my naguales kindred animal spirits. They follow me. I have literally stepped off of a plane in Phoenix and gotten my bag and stepped out on the curb and they'll be a big desert rat walking right in front of me.
-
I can't hang around with lots of people these days because I am hypersensitive. So when I am around a lot of people or a big roomful of people I get almost autistic. I get overwhelmed and really tired. So I don't like being around large groups.