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I try to be as honest about what I see and to speak rather than be silent, especially if it means I can save lives, or serve humanity.

Sandra Cisneros

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Sandra Cisneros
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 20
Arts Administrator
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Mean
Quiet
Trying
Especially
Honest
Humanity
Rather
Lives
Serve
Means
Save
Speak
Silent

More quotes by 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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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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Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.
Sandra Cisneros
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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
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We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.
Sandra Cisneros
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I don't see any kind of mirror of power, male power, that is, as a form of liberation. I don't believe in an eye for an eye. I don't believe this is truly freedom.
Sandra Cisneros
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I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It's what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.
Sandra Cisneros
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One way to get very humble is to dedicate the work you're going to do to your community. And 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
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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 realize that it's like spices in the kitchen. I need that turmeric. I'm sorry, but cinnamon isn't going to substitute . I feel that I can teach my listener about a new word they can use too. Well, what words are part of my own community, even if I'm monolingual, that I'm not allowing myself to use in a public sphere?
Sandra Cisneros
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My book would come out in one language, then it would come out in another language, then it would come out in One City, One Read, and I was always being called away from my desk.
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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Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction each thing helps the other.
Sandra Cisneros
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The experience taught me to be present in the real Buddhist sense of paying attention to the moment.
Sandra Cisneros
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I have to say my favorite stories are ghost stories. I don't like to see these made-up monster films or scary films with ghosts. It doesn't do anything to me. But a real ghost story that someone tells me, that I like.
Sandra Cisneros
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The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It's like being blind. You aren't less of a person, but you're missing out on wonderful things.
Sandra Cisneros
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I think people should read fairy tales, because were hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.
Sandra Cisneros
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The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.
Sandra Cisneros
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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
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I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.
Sandra Cisneros