Gloria E. Anzaldúa Quotes

A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.

What we say and what we do ultimately comes back to us so let us own our responsibility, place it in our hands, and carry it with dignity and strength.

Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an "alien" element.

Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.

I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads

I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world.

I change myself, I change the world.

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.

Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

I am mad - but I choose this madness.

the world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.

Do work that matters. Vale la pena

Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution.

Depression is useful. It signals that you need to make changes in your life, it challenges your tendency to withdraw, it reminds you to take action.

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.

I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.

All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.

Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.

I can't seem to stay out of my own way.

In trying to become 'objective,' Western culture made 'objects' of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing 'touch' with them.

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.

The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy.

But I'm more scared of not writing.

These my two hands / quick to slap my face / before others could slap it.

Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element.

I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.)

Though we tremble before uncertain futuresmay we meet illness, death and adversity with strengthmay we dance in the face of our fears.