Sandra Cisneros famous quotes

'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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#White #Want #Accepted

When you have your heart broken wide, you are also open to things of beauty as well as things of sadness. Once people are not here physically, the spiritual remains, we still connect, we can communicate, we can give and receive love and forgiveness. There is love after someone dies.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Spiritual #Heart #Sadness

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

#Love #Believe #Eternity

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Missing #Language #Speak

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Father #Optimistic #Men

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Mother #Writing #School

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

#Mexican #Latina #Certain

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Writing #Giving #Latina

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Beautiful #Powerful #Intelligent

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

#Book #Eye #Literature

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Beautiful #Flower #Fall

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Giving #Water #Magic

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

#Way #Strange #Following

Write about what makes you different.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Writing #Different

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

#Skins #Becoming #Obsessed

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Mean #Humanity #Trying

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Real #Nice #Writing

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

#Revenge #Thinking #Compassion

My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God. She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Mother #Ethnicity #Doors

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

#Men #Feminism #Form

The house was immaculate, as always, not a stray hair anywhere, not a flake of dandruff or a crumpled towel. Even the roses on the dining-room table held their breath. A kind of airless cleanliness that always made me want to sneeze.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Rose #House #Kind

I realize that when I moved out of my father’s house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Father #Space #House

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Too Much #Needs #Students

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

#Thinking #Mexican #Roles

Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Doors #Bricks #Crumbling

The stories are what no one wants to talk about. So you make up a story because no one is going to tell you the truth.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Stories #Want

I don't see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don't believe in an eye for an eye. I don't believe this is truly freedom.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Believe #Eye #Mirrors

I have to understand what my strengths and limitations are, and work from a true place. I try to do this as best I can while still protecting my writer self, which more than ever needs privacy.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Self #Trying #Needs

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

#Thinking #People #Fairy Tale

I wanted to write something in a voice that was unique to who I was. And I wanted something that was accessible to the person who works at Dunkin Donuts or who drives a bus, someone who comes home with their feet hurting like my father, someone whos busy and has too many children, like my mother.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Mother #Hurt #Children

God made men by baking them in an oven, but he forgot about the first batch, and that's how Black people were born. And then he was so anxious about the next batch, he took them out of the oven too soon, so that's how White people were made. But the third batch he let cook until they were golden-golden-golden, and, honey, that's you and me.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Men #White #People

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

#Eye #Thinking #Dizzy

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Bullying #Children #Bumps

I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It's what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Brother #Father #Community

I think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw, and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Heart #Thinking #Community

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

#Forget #Erase #Who You Are

Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
-- Sandra Cisneros

You can never have too much sky.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Sky #Too Much

Every writer I admire is my teacher. If you look at it, and if you care to read carefully enough and to read and reread a text, you teach yourself something about craft.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Teacher #Looks #Crafts

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?
-- Sandra Cisneros

#World #Littles #Matter

Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Memories #Safety #Childhood

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Historical #Female #Fiction

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Book #World #Aliens

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Love You #Heart #Brave

Generally if you're a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Daughter #Lying #Mexican

I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Men #Tables #Plates

But I deal with this by meditating and by understanding I've been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Humanity #Understanding #Battle

The devil knows more from experience than from being the devil
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Life #Devil

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.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Jobs #Order #Challenges

When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Powerful #Writing #Heart

One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I've ever spent.
-- Sandra Cisneros

#Night #Self Respect #Said

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

#Parrots #Feels