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I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.

Sandra Cisneros

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Sandra Cisneros
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: December 20
Arts Administrator
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Woman
Power
Give
Giving
Writing
Make
Things
Latina
Distinctive

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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When you become a driver, they don't tell you that you have to switch languages. The drivers have their own language and they don't tell you that as girls. How am I supposed to know that blinking light means something? There are all these little languages that you have to know, but you don't know.
Sandra Cisneros
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[Courage] always bigger than what you think you can handle, but you're never going to be given something you can't handle. So you say, Okay, when you tell me what it is that I'm supposed to do, please give me the courage to do it.
Sandra Cisneros
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I want to thank you, especially those people who are agnostic or atheist. I don't mean any offense by the things I said of the spirit world. Thank you for allowing me to speak about the spiritual, because I can't talk about my life or writing without mentioning that.
Sandra Cisneros
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'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.
Sandra Cisneros
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The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.
Sandra Cisneros
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I've been on television saying, ¡Vamos a la biblioteca!. That was great. Nobody had ever asked me.
Sandra Cisneros
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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
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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
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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
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True love in Mexico isn't between lovers it's between a parent and a child. Mexico is a very intense culture of sons adoring their mothers, and this is why I claim that Mexican culture is matriarchal. Because the one constant, faithful, inviolable, holy love of loves - the love of your life - is not your wife or your lover it's your mother.
Sandra Cisneros
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I can't hang around with lots of people these days because I am hypersensitive. So when I am around a lot of people or a big roomful of people I get almost autistic. I get overwhelmed and really tired. So I don't like being around large groups.
Sandra Cisneros
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I think no matter what you do you can't please everybody. You have to ask yourself, Did I do what I set out to do?
Sandra Cisneros
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I think one of the great primordial fears we have once we become conscious of our aloneness as children is the fear of losing our mother. We have that from the moment we realize we can lose her just in the supermarket. As a child, it was more terrifying than arithmetic.
Sandra Cisneros
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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
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Catholicism believes in the Virgen de Guadalupe. The mother of God is worshipped, especially in Latin America. I find her very empowering. I find that the Virgen de Guadalupe allowed me to return to parts of my upbringing I had disregarded.
Sandra Cisneros
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If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.
Sandra Cisneros
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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
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I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.
Sandra Cisneros
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My Virgen de Guadalupe is not the mother of God. She is God. She is a face for a god without a face, an indigena for a god without ethnicity, a female deity for a god who is genderless, but I also understand that for her to approach me, for me to finally open the door and accept her, she had to be a woman like me.
Sandra Cisneros
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I began writing as an experimental writer.
Sandra Cisneros