Julia Alvarez Quotes & Sayings

#1. When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.

Julia Alvarez

#2. Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

Julia Alvarez

#3. I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

Julia Alvarez

#4. Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves.

Julia Alvarez

#5. I write to find out what I am thinking.
I write to find out who I am.
I write to understand things.

Julia Alvarez

#6. Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.

Julia Alvarez

#7. Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

Julia Alvarez

#8. Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

Julia Alvarez

#9. It doesn't make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn't we trust them instead of being afraid of them?

Julia Alvarez

#10. Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

Julia Alvarez

#11. Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

Julia Alvarez

#12. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

Julia Alvarez

#13. I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.

Julia Alvarez

#14. A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.

Julia Alvarez

#15. Depression is always in the details.

Julia Alvarez

#16. I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.

Julia Alvarez

#17. It's always gratifying to hear from a passionate reader, and as a longtime educator, I'm especially pleased and heartened when that reader is a young student who is inspired to write me and let me know that my book has helped him or her find her way.

Julia Alvarez

#18. The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

Julia Alvarez

#19. The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.

Julia Alvarez

#20. Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

Julia Alvarez

#21. But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Julia Alvarez