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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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Sandra Cisneros
Age: 69
Born: 1954
Born: December 20
Arts Administrator
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Time
Space
Page
Think
Story
Performance
Thinking
White
Performances
Black
Beats
Tell
Pages
Blackout
Stories
Bottom
Blackouts
Also
Poetry
Pauses
Important
Learned
Timing

More quotes by Sandra Cisneros

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You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, Oooh . . . Now my tactics are different.
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If you can't fall asleep, learn how to meditate. I would recommend you listen to a beautiful tape called Spiritual Power, Spiritual Practice [Energy Evaluation Meditations For Morning and Evening, 1998]. It was the one that got me out of my writer's block when I was writing Caramelo. It's by Carolyn Myss.
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This is the age of fear and so many of us feel afraid to speak out about what has happened to our lives in the wake of 9/11. Television promotes the world as a scary place for the United States and this justifies peeling away every element of privacy we had before. The media is monopolized so we don't even hear a lot of dissent about this new era.
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Even if you don't believe in God, you have to believe in love.
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The truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say.
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I always have to have sweet and salty. I know some of you are going to say, Oh, I tried dates. I hate them. That's probably because you had the ones that were on the shelf for three years. Go to some healthy place and get the fresh ones, and you will just love them. You'll start eating them and think they're so good.
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Some people need flowers, some people need dandelions. It's medicine, it's what you need at that time in your life.
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Books are medicine and you have to take the right medicine that you need at that moment or that day or that time in your life.
Sandra Cisneros
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Don't be afraid to say what you don't know, and speak for what you do know. Say, I can't speak for all Latinas, but I can speak for me and tell you very, very honestly.
Sandra Cisneros
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You get good at being by yourself and you're condemned to a life sentence of solitude. You think, Wait a minute! I should have been a tap dancer or something. But in my life, I feel like I take my stories to people orally.
Sandra Cisneros
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As people who are women, who are Indigenous and live on Indigenous lands, we know, and this is something I understand the older I get, that they don't visit the same way the postman may visit but they do visit. They visit in ways that our modern society often disregards and considers immaterial or unreal.
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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I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me.
Sandra Cisneros
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To this day, on my cheat days from my diet, which are New Year's Eve and my birthday, I buy luxury foods that are very indicative of my class.
Sandra Cisneros
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What do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.
Sandra Cisneros
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Like all guests, after a fortnight, grief is best beyond the door.
Sandra Cisneros
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I was silent as a child, and silenced as a young woman I am taking my lumps and bumps for being a big mouth, now, but usually from those whose opinion I don't respect.
Sandra Cisneros
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It's what's available to the poor communities. They do buy healthy stuff, you know, but the lettuce is usually iceberg lettuce and to get any taste, they have to use all that ranch dressing.
Sandra Cisneros
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Spanish is a poetic language, in particular the Spanish of Mexico which has a wonderful animistic attitude you might not see in the Spanish of the peninsula. I think it has to do with the indigenous way of looking at nature.
Sandra Cisneros
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I was interested in cross-pollinating the two. I thought there was something lovely in the little vignette forms. I wanted to explore that.
Sandra Cisneros