Sofia Quintero quotes
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The one thing that always sticks out to me was how reading to young people - even if they're not that young, even if they're too cool for school, middle schoolers - what a profound act of love it is.
-- Sofia Quintero -
A lot of times, people say that people read to escape. But I think if you come from any community that is underrepresented, in any kind of media, whether that's around race, around class, or sexual orientation, religion, whatever it may be, sometimes you read to be affirmed. To have your humanity rendered complexly. And sometimes seeing yourself on the page is affirming. And we know that for some young people, that can also be life-saving.
-- Sofia Quintero -
Sure, kids want to read whatever is the hot book, and of course they want to read fantasy and any kind of speculative fiction, but they also like to read stories with kids that look just like them, that have the same problems as them. And I've noticed that what they particularly want to see is to see those characters prevail. So they don't want sanitized situations. They want stories to be raw, they want them to be gritty, but they also do want to see the hope at the end of the story.
-- Sofia Quintero -
We work with tweens. Middle school grades. That's a key time in a young person's literary history. That's the time when they're still open to reading, but there are other things that are starting to interest them that can pull them out of their reading habits. It's a critical time to make the reading habits stick, but at the same time it's not pulling teeth to try to get them to read in the first place.
-- Sofia Quintero -
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I particularly love where I work because I was born, raised, and still live in the Bronx. I work in a Bronx location, so it's very fulfilling to me to be working in my home borough, and working with kids that are a lot like me and who can see themselves in me. My own teaching philosophy is to expose them to books that they might not otherwise read, particularly authors of color, authors whose stories are based in New York City.
-- Sofia Quintero -
When I say myself, I don't mean just as a woman of color, as a girl who's growing up in the Bronx, as people growing up in some way economically-challenged, not growing up with money. It was also even just the way we spoke. The vernacular. I learned that it's alright to say "ain't." My characters can speak the way they authentically are, and that makes for good story. It's not making for good story to make them speak proper English when nobody speaks like that on the playground.
-- Sofia Quintero -
Not only did we survive AIDS, Reaganomics, poverty, racism, gang violence, police brutality, substance abuse - not only did we survive that, we created something endured. And whatever you might think of commercial hip hop now, there's a lot there to like and there's a lot there to critique and there's a lot of things you could say both about. But we created something that endured when we ourselves were not supposed to endure. When we ourselves were not supposed to survive and thrive. So I think that is worthy of respect and preservation and it's US history.
-- Sofia Quintero -
There's just something about being a young, working class, working poor, person of color in New York City in the 80's that needs to be understood by people outside of that experience. The way I put it is that we created something really amazing, hip hop, when we weren't even supposed to survive.
-- Sofia Quintero -
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All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
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I really wished he hadn't made me hate to read the Bible. Having it shoved down my throat all my life had made me bitter toward reading it. I believed it, but my dad had used it to his benefit too many times and ignored the parts in there that would point out his wrongs. Like judging Beau without even knowing him. That was in the Bible too.
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As a general rule, I abstain from reading reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I cannot properly offer an answer.
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From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.
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But then, even with sex, I'm more in the school of less is more in movies.
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Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.
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Facts are what pedantic, dull people have instead of opinions.
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There are a lot of people who know me who can't understand for the life of them why I would got to work on something as unserious as baseball. If they only knew.
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Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.
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Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of people.
