Sandra Cisneros Quotes
-
I feel like I am in a box of bees when I am in a room with lots of people and I'm just looking for the door. I find myself getting more and more agoraphobic as time goes on.
-
I know there are a lot of women who are afraid of driving on highways.
-
And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
-
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.
-
I know the American Library Association has models for working with the poor. They do have that, and I think that we really need to put our efforts - if we want to think long-range and invest in the community so that we don't have to, you know, invest in prisons - into making a change, because I know that the library can make a change in a life, because it made a change in mine.
-
I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Once you can open yourself to joy, you feel as if you've transformed your sadness into illumination, which is really all that art is. All we want to do is transform the negative emotions into light. We want to compost them into light.
-
When I was at home, I wasn't shy. I was the clown at home, because I was loved. It was in the outside world that I was judged and I wasn't loved. That was very clear to me, that I wasn't loved. So I became very quiet. You know, those little girls you see in those pictures that look like they want to hunch, I was trying to disappear into my shoulder blades. The quietest person in the classroom, that was me. But that wasn't me at home.
-
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.
-
Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.
-
The Mexico - United States border was always porous. People have been going and coming back since before the Spaniards arrived. Now we're seeing communities who have family members on the other side very frightened. I feel saddened for those families divided by violence. The whole border area is under siege.
-
You don't have to be the specialist on everything. You can try to inform yourself.
-
That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.
-
You know that you wouldn't take a baby on a plane without diapers, so when you leave your house, take care of you, like you would a baby. Don't leave your house without packing some healthy things.
-
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.
-
Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
-
If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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."
-
If you start thinking about who's going to read it [you're writing], or what grade will you get, or is it going to win that award, or are you going to get into this graduate program, you're blocking the light, and the light is that guidance and love we get when we open up our hearts and are guided by our higher selves, or God, or the Buddha Lupe Buddha and the Virgin of Guadalupe fused together, as they are in the tattoo on Sandra's right arm, or whatever you believe in, or love.
-
I never paid attention when people said, "That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction," except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.