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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.

Julia Alvarez

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Julia Alvarez
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: March 27
Novelist
Poet
Writer
New York City
New York
Write
Needle
Together
Scrap
Back
Pencil
Whole
Needles
Writing
Undone
Like
Pencils
World
Thread
Stitching
Coming
Scraps

More quotes by Julia Alvarez

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A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.
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The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.
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Depression is always in the details.
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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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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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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 think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.
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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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Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.
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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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Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.
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The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.
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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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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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I write to find out what I am thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things.
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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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A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.
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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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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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Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves.
Julia Alvarez