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A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

Julia Alvarez

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Julia Alvarez
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: March 27
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Heart
Way
Document
Documents
Historical
Travel
Novel
Human
Humans

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I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.
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Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.
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Depression is always in the details.
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The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.
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Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.
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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.
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Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.
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A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.
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Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.
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Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves.
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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.
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It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together.
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How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.
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When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.
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I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.
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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.
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The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.
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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?
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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.
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Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.
Julia Alvarez