Sandra Cisneros Quotes

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.

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.

You can never have too much sky.

I have to say that the traditional role is kind of a myth. I think the traditional Mexican woman is a fierce woman.

I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.

I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.

I usually say Latina, Mexican-American or American Mexican, and in certain contexts, Chicana, depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.

You were given that pain and that vision because you have something to do with it.

I try to be as honest about what I see and to speak rather than be silent, especially if it means I can save lives, or serve humanity.

The most powerful speaking you can do is the speaking that comes from your heart and your love.

The border between the dead and the living, if you're Mexican, doesn't exist. The dead are part of your life.

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?

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.

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It's medicine, it's what you need at that time in your life.

The truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say.

Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.

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.

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.

Write about what makes you different.

The thoughts of letting go of everything I love overwhelms like a tsunami of sorrow.

There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

One of the things Thich Nhat Hanh taught me: he says, "When you're in a hurry, go slower." That works every time, unless you're trying to catch a plane.

The older I get, the more I'm conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn't it?

I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman; I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don't respect.

When I was a child, I was very shy, and there's still a part of me that's very shy.

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.

Like all guests, after a fortnight, grief is best beyond the door.

I began writing as an experimental writer.

My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men.

All of my works are performance pieces, as is true for many writers of color, writers who have indigenous roots - because our basis is spoken word.

I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.

My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.

I think people should read fairy tales, because were hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It's like being blind. You aren't less of a person, but you're missing out on wonderful things.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

I'm filled with a new joy mixed with old grief.

I'm just as unhappy about San Antonio as I was about Chicago. If you're unhappy about certain things, you're unhappy everywhere.

I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

I like to think about the bestseller list as, "This is the medicine cabinet of a very sick country." Let me look and see what they're reading that isn't nourishing them.