Quote

To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

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Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Age: 61 †
Born: 1942
Born: September 26
Died: 2004
Died: May 15
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Scholar
Writer
Gloria E. Anzaldua
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa
Back
Outside
Competent
Live
Inside
Separate
Enough
Lose
Wherever
Feel
Loses
Secure
Feels
System
Carry
Life
Family
Leaving
Turtle
Culture
Roots
Turtles
Home
Touch
Origins

More quotes by Gloria E. Anzaldúa

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All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.
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Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.
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Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads
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I can't seem to stay out of my own way.
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Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.
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A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.
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Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.
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Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution.
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An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.
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In trying to become 'objective,' Western culture made 'objects' of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing 'touch' with them.
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The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't. We haven't.
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Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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Write with your eyes like painters, with your ears like musicians, with your feet like dancers. You are the truthsayer with quill and torch. Write with your tongues of fire. Don't let the pen banish you from yourself.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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But I'm more scared of not writing.
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To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an alien element.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
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Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa