Top 100 Sandra Cisneros Quotes
#1. One way to get very humble is to dedicate the work you're going to do to your community.
Sandra Cisneros
#2. My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.
Sandra Cisneros
#3. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate
Sandra Cisneros
#4. 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
#5. It's so good for your health to take those naps. I don't know why people brag that they sleep five hours. I'd be ashamed. I'm proud that I sleep nine hours.
Sandra Cisneros
#6. When I say what I'm reading, this is what I need. I know the ills that plague me.
Sandra Cisneros
#7. "You're next, after the feather dancers." And you had to get their attention, because otherwise people would go, "Oh, a poet." You really have to learn.
Sandra Cisneros
#8. You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, "Oooh ... " Now my tactics are different.
Sandra Cisneros
#10. I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.
Sandra Cisneros
#11. I'm most tired after I read, after I've just done a performance, but what I try to do is to fuel and eat a really healthy meal before I perform. I want to have enough energy to talk to that last person.
Sandra Cisneros
#12. San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way.
Sandra Cisneros
#13. I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.
Sandra Cisneros
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. If you're poor, potato chips are the food of life for you. It's the caviar.
Sandra Cisneros
#18. My trainer taught me, because he's Iranian, and that's a beautiful snack [pistachios]. I have some with me, actually, in my bag. You could eat that on a plane instead of the salted nuts. And a serving size a day is the size of your hand, not the size of your head!
Sandra Cisneros
#19. Being on a highway, all that speed and aggression, is very terrifying to me.
Sandra Cisneros
#20. 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
#21. I lose things. I write things and they disappear from my desk, my life. I move a lot. I wanted to gather them and put them under one roof, under one cover, so I could document my life in a series of snapshots.
Sandra Cisneros
#22. There's a lot of people that need these stories, and they can't come to my book, so I'm going to be the bookmobile and I'm going to come to them.
Sandra Cisneros
#23. It's what's available to the poor communities. They do buy healthy stuff, you know, but the lettuce is usually iceberg lettuce and to get any taste, they have to use all that ranch dressing.
Sandra Cisneros
#24. If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.
Sandra Cisneros
#26. The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.
Sandra Cisneros
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.
Sandra Cisneros
#31. Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.
Sandra Cisneros
#32. I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.
Sandra Cisneros
#33. It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings.
Sandra Cisneros
#34. 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
#35. One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.
Sandra Cisneros
#36. What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.
Sandra Cisneros
#37. I didn't intend to be writing - the writer's life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.
Sandra Cisneros
#38. [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Sandra Cisneros
#39. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in
Sandra Cisneros
#40. I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.
Sandra Cisneros
#41. I wasn't aware that 'House on Mango Street' was so influenced by Spanish until after I finished.
Sandra Cisneros
#42. I was interested in cross-pollinating the two. I thought there was something lovely in the little vignette forms. I wanted to explore that.
Sandra Cisneros
#43. Books are medicine and you have to take the right medicine that you need at that moment or that day or that time in your life.
Sandra Cisneros
#44. 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
#45. The border between the dead and the living, if you're Mexican, doesn't exist. The dead are part of your life. Like my dad, who's not here, but he's here.That's why there's the Day of the Dead. There's such a connection with the dead.
Sandra Cisneros
#46. I think people should read fairy tales, because we're hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.
Sandra Cisneros
#47. I look at Thich Nhat Hanh and I look at Marshall Rosenberg, and they're more concerned about the long range. And that long range means that you have to sit down with people who don't think like you. I want to reach people who don't think like me.
Sandra Cisneros
#48. Instead of putting cheese with ranchero sauce, chile is really very good for you. If you put that in, you get flavoring, so you're not eating bland food, especially if you're used to spicy food.
Sandra Cisneros
#50. One of the things I like to pack, that I take with me all the time, is my Virgensita de Guadalupe. It doesn't take much room in your suitcase. If you have one that isn't so fancy, you can use it on the plane when you're scared.
Sandra Cisneros
#51. I had no concept of this [healthy food] until very, very late in life, thanks to a trainer/nutritionist that I met who has been working with me since I was forty-five.
Sandra Cisneros
#52. I do travel a lot, because I need oxygen, I need to go to places to meet people who aren't upset at me because I'm asking for peace.
Sandra Cisneros
#53. You were given that pain and that vision because you have something to do with it.
Sandra Cisneros
#54. There's all kinds of ways to wean yourself off of sugar - because it is like an addiction.
Sandra Cisneros
#55. I've come to some balance now and calmness. If anything happened to me and I got hit by a bus - I hope this doesn't happen, but if something happened - my body of work is something I could rest on. I don't feel, "Oh God, I have to hurry up ... "
Sandra Cisneros
#56. In the business world, I did fairly well, but wasn't happy. A bout of sciatica put me flat on my back. All I could do was read, listen to my mother's stories about the Sandovals, and daydream: a return to self. My writing career had begun.
Sandra Cisneros
#57. For me, a story's a story if people want to hear it; it's very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I'm speaking it out loud.
Sandra Cisneros
#58. I don't want to blame anybody, but I just want to tell you that the process of writing is antisocial, so on the days that you have something really important to write, go from lying down directly to your notepad or your computer. Do not talk.
Sandra Cisneros
#59. That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.
Sandra Cisneros
#60. 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
#61. I was so happy when I went to Rome and I saw that the Romans eat them too, the squash blossoms. No wonder I like the Italians!
Sandra Cisneros
#63. One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.
Sandra Cisneros
#64. 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
#65. The good thing about Dennis [ Mathis] is, even though he's a white, he respected that I was doing something quirky with my English. He loved it when I would mix up the Americanisms and say, "That's water over the dam."
Sandra Cisneros
#67. Marshall Rosenberg talks about how we can create peace in the communities we work with. He's been traveling to warring nations to create peace within those countries.
Sandra Cisneros
#68. There was a time when I used to go to Mexico every year. But then Mexico changed a lot - between 1995 and 2005, Mexico changed a lot.
Sandra Cisneros
#69. I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.
Sandra Cisneros
#70. I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
Sandra Cisneros
#71. When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."
Sandra Cisneros
#72. I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me.
Sandra Cisneros
#73. In my youth, daydreaming nurtured me, provided a safe haven. I'd sleep for twelve hours and even when awake escape to the safe place in my mind.
Sandra Cisneros
#75. My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.
Sandra Cisneros
#76. You want to be able to say anything when you do your first draft, because some of that goofy stuff that you think has nothing to do with it is probably where the mother lode is.
Sandra Cisneros
#78. The older you get, the more power you have with language as a writer, which means that you have to be extra responsible for what you say, whether it's in print or in front of a microphone, because those words can go out and kill or go out and plant seeds for peace.
Sandra Cisneros
#79. I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.
Sandra Cisneros
#80. I want to write an essay called "Fear of Mexico," because I always feel like Mexico's this lover that never writes to me.
Sandra Cisneros
#81. One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I've ever spent.
Sandra Cisneros
#82. I feel the fear touches on something deeper. A sense perhaps of, "My life is speeding past me and I can't get a handle on it."
Sandra Cisneros
#83. You know, we should have cards like the deaf have. "Can't talk, I'm writing today."
Sandra Cisneros
#84. I think that Mexican-American kids live in a global world. It's not even bi-, it's multi-. You know, for those of us who grew up with different countries on our block, different nationalities, you know, we moved into multiple worlds.
Sandra Cisneros
#85. 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
#86. Well, I'm Buddhist, Ray, and so part of my Buddhism has allowed me to look a little more deeply at people and the events in my life that created me. And I think a lot of that Buddhism comes out in the world view in this novel.
Sandra Cisneros
#87. By community I mean that community you have a special vision for, that only you see, that no one else in a room sees. That special community in pain, that through a pain you've suffered, you're able to have that vision, that super-ray vision.
Sandra Cisneros
#88. There are a few of the authors that I think have made a great big impact on my life. The way I used to do things when I was younger was more about being outrageous, and there was a lot of ego involved in that.
Sandra Cisneros
#89. I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death.
Sandra Cisneros
#90. I know the books that I need to help me to be wiser than my years and be kinder and more compassionate and more patient than I really am.
Sandra Cisneros
#91. 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
#92. When I was writing Caramelo the last couple of years, a sixty-hour work week was normal. And now I'm lucky if I have eight hours.
Sandra Cisneros
#93. There's a lot of things that haven't been communicated to our communities. I didn't know these things myself. I didn't know that if you ate cheap food, it was like buying cheap gasoline, and there was a reason why after an hour you get headaches, or youhypoglycemic.
Sandra Cisneros
#94. My idea of a meal, if I was hungry, was to open a bag of potato chips.
Sandra Cisneros
#95. That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.
Sandra Cisneros
#96. You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, "Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something". But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
Sandra Cisneros
#97. I'm just as unhappy about San Antonio as I was about Chicago. If you're unhappy about certain things, you're unhappy everywhere.
Sandra Cisneros
#98. I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony.
Sandra Cisneros
#99. Heartbreak makes us stronger; it's an opportunity for spiritual growth. How can you understand someone else's pain if you have not yourself suffered?
Sandra Cisneros
#100. I liked the books I read that said things like 'I shan't'. I would try to find a way to say in my life, to reply, 'I shan't do that, mother.' That was so far away from my barrio world.
Sandra Cisneros
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