Sandra Cisneros Quotes

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Sandra Cisneros

Profession : Author

Birth : December 20, 1954

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

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

Sandra Cisneros

The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself.

Sandra Cisneros

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

For a writer, for the solitude to write, you don't need a room of your own, you need a house.

Sandra Cisneros

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

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

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

In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness. It means waiting. It is like the number nine, a muddy color.

Sandra Cisneros

I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer.

Sandra Cisneros

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 who's busy and has too many children, like my mother.

Sandra Cisneros

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

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

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

Sandra Cisneros

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

I think people should read fairy tales, because we're hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.

Sandra Cisneros

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

I'm afraid I'm still trying to find that balance. Especially now that everyone wants a piece of me. I find that I have to become more and more reclusive, and pick and choose when I am public and when I am private.

Sandra Cisneros

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

I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant.

Sandra Cisneros