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You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

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
Forget
Erase

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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I never paid attention when people said, That's gotta be poetry. That's gotta be fiction, except when I was in a graduate program, and you had to claim your genre.
Sandra Cisneros
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I hope I'm not just looked as a writer that is popular but as a writer of literary value.
Sandra Cisneros
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If you're going to write about the river, you've got to get in.
Sandra Cisneros
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Mexico is only a memory of childhood safety.
Sandra Cisneros
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Now I feel life is really short and I have to take care of things.
Sandra Cisneros
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I remember when they started publishing Latino fiction years ago. You had to be really good to get published. Now you don't have to be that good.
Sandra Cisneros
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One of the books that has guided me in the last ten years of my life to help me to be that leader is the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace. He's a Vietnamese monk. He was nominated for a Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King.
Sandra Cisneros
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I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.
Sandra Cisneros
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Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.
Sandra Cisneros
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I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate
Sandra Cisneros
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My Spanish is a daughter's Spanish. I write, but my Spanish really is very limited.
Sandra Cisneros
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Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.
Sandra Cisneros
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I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.
Sandra Cisneros
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We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.
Sandra Cisneros
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You know how women have this clock when they want to have a baby? I had this clock where I wanted to win a national award by thirty, be at a big press by thirty-five. I was always working with these self-driven goals.
Sandra Cisneros
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If you have potato chips, that means, Who's coming over?Wealthy people - white people who're wealthy - have a bag of potato chips that's folded over with a clip. What? There's some left over? In my house, if there was a bag of potato chips, we'd pour it in a bowl and everybody would just dip in till it was gone.
Sandra Cisneros
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When you speak words that are relevant to people, they automatically shut up and you know you are in the presence of some very magical words. It's a gift when someone can listen and be quiet and not interrupt.
Sandra Cisneros
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Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.
Sandra Cisneros
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I can't go to Hindu countries where they respect rats and mice, and I can't go camping. I don't like to go into subways, because I always see them. Rats are like my naguales [kindred animal spirits]. They follow me.
Sandra Cisneros