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“'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
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“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
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“I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.”
-- Sandra Cisneros
#Love #Believe #Eternity
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“Write about what makes you different.”
-- Sandra Cisneros
#Writing #Different
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“I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.”
-- Sandra Cisneros
#Skins #Becoming #Obsessed
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“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
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“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
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“Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.”
-- Sandra Cisneros
#Revenge #Thinking #Compassion
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
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“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
