Sandra Cisneros Quotes
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You know how women have this clock when they want to have a baby? I had this clock where I wanted to win a national award by thirty, be at a big press by thirty-five. I was always working with these self-driven goals.
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Courage always bigger than what you think you can handle, but you're never going to be given something you can't handle. So you say, "Okay, when you tell me what it is that I'm supposed to do, please give me the courage to do it."
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When you speak words that are relevant to people, they automatically shut up and you know you are in the presence of some very magical words. It's a gift when someone can listen and be quiet and not interrupt.
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When I lost my father, I thought I learned about grief and transition. However, nobody tells you what it's like to lose your mother. They don't tell you that you're going to feel like an orphan at whatever age you are as an adult.
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Don't be afraid to say what you don't know, and speak for what you do know. Say, "I can't speak for all Latinas, but I can speak for me and tell you very, very honestly."
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That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.
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Even if we don't know if God exists, we can be certain love exists, because its power transcends death.
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I didn't marry. I didn't have children. I followed the food supply for jobs. I kept writing at night. And that kept me moving. It kept my life disruptive. It broke up many relationships. Was it worth it? Yes.
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Catholicism believes in the Virgen de Guadalupe. The mother of God is worshipped, especially in Latin America. I find her very empowering. I find that the Virgen de Guadalupe allowed me to return to parts of my upbringing I had disregarded.
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Why don't we have people like Thich Nhat Hanh or Marshall Rosenberg and Nelson Mandela solving violent situations in a peaceful way?
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You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
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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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If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.
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Even though it's hard to believe, but people who know me really well know I'm shy. I have to go past that fear.
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There are two things you need to ask for, to open up that channel, so you get the light. One is humility, because our ego is always going to block that guidance, and so you ask for humility.And the second thing you're going to ask for is courage, because what you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do.
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You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.
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Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
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There was a time when I used to go to Mexico every year. But then Mexico changed a lot - between 1995 and 2005, Mexico changed a lot.
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My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men.
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I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.
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I was very lucky. I don't know German, or Dutch, or Chinese, or Thai. I don't know them, so I can't judge, so I have to go on the word of the publisher that it's a good translation.
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A second person that's come to my life very recently, and I'm thankful for it, is Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of the Nonviolent Communication Organization. He has all these books about how we can use our language nonviolently to help create peace. He's using a lot of Buddhism too, but he's helping me to think about language.
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The ability to be present with every single person and engage was a great model for me of the work that a writer needs to do. Writers, living or dead, still guide me in many ways.
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There's a lot of things that haven't been communicated to our communities. I didn't know these things myself. I didn't know that if you ate cheap food, it was like buying cheap gasoline, and there was a reason why after an hour you get headaches, or youhypoglycemic.