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.

It takes a long time for women to feel it's alright to be chingona. To aspire to be a chingona!...You are saying, 'This is my camino, this is my path and I'm gonna follow it, regardless of what culture says.' I don't think the church likes chingonas. I don't think the state likes chingonas.! And fathers definitely do not like chingonas. And boyfriends don't like chingonas. But, you know, I remain optimistic. I will meet a man who likes a chingona, one day. One day, my chingon will come.

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.

We need to write because so many of our stories are not being heard. Where could they be heard in this era of fear and media monopolies? Writing allows us to transform what has happened to us and to fight back against what's hurting us. While not everyone is an author, everyone is a writer and I think that the process of writing is deeply spiritual and liberatory.

I'm a witch woman--high on tobacco and holy water. I'm a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts...I have the magic of words. The power to charm and kill at will.

'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 . You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It's medicine, it's what you need at 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.

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

True love in Mexico isn't between lovers; it's between a parent and a child. Mexico is a very intense culture of sons adoring their mothers, and this is why I claim that Mexican culture is matriarchal. Because the one constant, faithful, inviolable, holy love of loves - the love of your life - is not your wife or your lover; it's your mother.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years.

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.

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.

I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me.

I can get by and chatter and talk and tell funny stories, make people laugh, but I don't have as many words, I don't have the vocabulary. I think if I forced myself to read in Spanish - you know, I always say I'm going to, but I lose my patience reading in Spanish, because I really do read the way a third grader does, mouthing the words. That takes a long time!

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.

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

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

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.

Heartbreak allows us to also experience joy and love but you have to walk through heartbreak to even know what joy is. Heartbreak is a constant and it is even necessary. It allows us the opportunity of introspection and exploration. Those processes are what is necessary to write and engage in the arts.