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.

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.

Be positive. Be true. Be kind.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

When something looks impossible, don’t give up without testing its impossibility

She wished such words unsaid with all her heart

Life - with or without softener- is hard

Trying to get a fast ball past Hank Aaron is like trying to get the sun past a rooster.

As I see it every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.

People who are considered scary or odd or even monsters are so often the people that just need love and someone to care for them.

Why is it that when we talk to God, it's called 'prayer,' but when God speaks to us, it's called schizophrenia?

Here we are, a man and a woman, both wanting the same things, and yet, you aren’t attracted to me.