Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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Every single house has had death visit.
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I remember when they started publishing Latino fiction years ago. You had to be really good to get published. Now you don't have to be that good.
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We are told by media - books, television, reality shows - that heartbreak is this terrible thing and yet we should seek it. We're told that heartbreak is all about love and we should just go after that high over and over again. We are told it is healthy to be addicted to this kind of behavior and the highs associated with love. But, that's not all what heartbreak is.
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If you live in poor neighborhoods - I know from living in several poor neighborhoods - the worst supermarkets in the city are in the poorest neighborhoods, where people don't have cars.
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My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.
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Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
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When you have a flourishing of the economy you have a flourishing of the arts.
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There's all kinds of ways to wean yourself off of sugar - because it is like an addiction.
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I'm learning a lot by reading teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron. They teach me because I feel like I have a responsibility to the communities that I speak to.
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I've been on television saying, "¡Vamos a la biblioteca!". That was great. Nobody had ever asked me.
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My Spanish is a daughter's Spanish. I write, but my Spanish really is very limited.
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I prefer to go to the little towns now, because in little towns people are kind. I like going to Tepotzlán.
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I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers.
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I do travel a lot, because I need oxygen, I need to go to places to meet people who aren't upset at me because I'm asking for peace.
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The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.
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We changed it to emocionó, the way you say in Spanish, "to emotion me" to be moved. That, as opposed to "haunt." We wanted the feeling of sadness and grief and obsession, so we used emocionó.
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You'll change. You'll see. Wait till you meet Mr. Right.
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Get yourself empty in the Eastern sense. Not in the Western sense. In the Western sense when we feel empty we feel lonely, miserable, but in the Eastern sense - "I'm so empty, because I'm filled with everything, and I'm connected to everything." It's very energizing. You want that kind of emptiness, whatever you have to do to get yourself quiet.
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What you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do. It's always bigger than what you think you can handle, but you're never going to be given something you can't handle.
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If we got an educational program going, we could tell people, "Instead of butter, use avocado." That's something we eat, it has the good fat, and it has a good texture, and it tastes better. Just imagine if you substituted that. Or if we switched to olive oil, the extra virgin olive oil, we could still have our taquitos, but put a little oil on them and put them in the oven and bake them.
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Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
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Books are medicine and you have to take the right medicine that you need at that moment or that day or that time in your life.
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Generally if you're a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.
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By community I mean that community you have a special vision for, that only you see, that no one else in a room sees. That special community in pain, that through a pain you've suffered, you're able to have that vision, that super-ray vision.