Cisneros Quotes & Sayings

I'm most tired after I read, after I've just done a performance, but what I try to do is to fuel and eat a really healthy meal before I perform. I want to have enough energy to talk to that last person. — Sandra Cisneros

Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in — Sandra Cisneros

Heartbreak makes us stronger; it's an opportunity for spiritual growth. How can you understand someone else's pain if you have not yourself suffered? — Sandra Cisneros

I'm from Chicago, so the Chicago working-class poets still mean a great deal to me. — Sandra Cisneros

I tell people to write the stories that you're afraid to talk about, the stories you wish you'd forget, because those have the most power. Those are the ones that have the most strength when you give them as a testimony. — Sandra Cisneros

In my youth, daydreaming nurtured me, provided a safe haven. I'd sleep for twelve hours and even when awake escape to the safe place in my mind. — Sandra Cisneros

I was reading Emily Dickinson and Edwin Arlington Robinson, but these weren't the poets that influenced me. I think Gwendolyn Brooks influenced me because she wrote about Chicago, and she wrote about poor people. And she influenced me in my life by giving me a blurb. I would see her in action, and she listened to every single person. She didn't say, "Oh, I'm tired. I gotta go." She was there, and present, with every single person. She's one of the great teachers. — Sandra Cisneros

We started an organization that's the only sub-organization of the MacArthur Foundation and we are called the Macarturos.Usually when I win something, I'm the only one of my ethnicity to get it, but this time I met all these Latinos, and I was so excited. I'd meet someone and I'd go, "Can you come to San Antonio?" And they'd go, "Oh yeah." And suddenly I had twelve people that said they would come. And I didn't know how it was going to be. And that's how the Macarturos became a reality, where these very generous geniuses come to San Antonio and work together. — Sandra Cisneros

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

I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers. — Sandra Cisneros

For me, a story's a story if people want to hear it; it's very much based on oral storytelling. And for me, a story is a story when people give me the privilege of listening when I'm speaking it out loud. — Sandra Cisneros

[Thich Nhat Hanh] the one that revolutionized Buddhism. Instead of being monks just engaged in meditation, it was active Buddhism. You went out and felt the ills of the community around you. Instead of retreating to a monastery, you were out in the streets working. And he's been a great help to me, just reading his book, so I don't feel helpless about what I can do about all the violence around me. — Sandra Cisneros

'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

Get yourself empty in the Eastern sense. Not in the Western sense. In the Western sense when we feel empty we feel lonely, miserable, but in the Eastern sense - "I'm so empty, because I'm filled with everything, and I'm connected to everything." It's very energizing. You want that kind of emptiness, whatever you have to do to get yourself quiet. — Sandra Cisneros

I know there are a lot of women who are afraid of driving on highways. — Sandra Cisneros

When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling. — Junot Diaz

You know, you want to be outrageous when you're young, so all the young people say, "Oooh ... " Now my tactics are different. — Sandra Cisneros

I'm afraid I'm still trying to find that balance. Especially now that everyone wants a piece of me. I find that I have to become more and more reclusive, and pick and choose when I am public and when I am private. — Sandra Cisneros

San Antonio drives me crazy, but Chicago drives me crazy in a different way. — Sandra Cisneros

One of the things Thich Nhat Hanh taught me: he says, "When you're in a hurry, go slower." That works every time, unless you're trying to catch a plane. — Sandra Cisneros

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

I have to understand what my strengths and limitations are, and work from a true place. I try to do this as best I can while still protecting my writer self, which more than ever needs privacy. — Sandra Cisneros

I realize that when I moved out of my father's house I shocked and frightened him because I needed a room of my own, a space of my own to reinvent myself. — Sandra Cisneros

My feminism is humanism, with the weakest being those who I represent, and that includes many beings and life forms, including some men. — Sandra Cisneros

Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry. — Sandra Cisneros

I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death. — Sandra Cisneros

It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used to writing and doing these little miniature paintings. — Sandra Cisneros

I would drive on streets that were one-way and think, "Why are they all honking at me?" — Sandra Cisneros

I think that Mexican-American kids live in a global world. It's not even bi-, it's multi-. You know, for those of us who grew up with different countries on our block, different nationalities, you know, we moved into multiple worlds. — Sandra Cisneros

I feel your blood
raging in my veins — Antonio Cisneros

You can try reading books that will help you be a leader, like Marshall Rosenberg and Thich Nhat Hanh. Be very humble and say, "I don't know why. I don't feel qualified, but I accept this role that you gave me, and so help me." — Sandra Cisneros

I usually say Latina, Mexican-American or American Mexican, and in certain contexts, Chicana, depending on whether my audience understands the term or not. — Sandra Cisneros

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. — Sandra Cisneros

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin. — Sandra Cisneros

The truth has a strange way of following you, of coming up to you and making you listen to what it has to say. — Sandra Cisneros

I can get by and chatter and talk and tell funny stories, make people laugh, but I don't have as many words, I don't have the vocabulary. I think if I forced myself to read in Spanish - you know, I always say I'm going to, but I lose my patience reading in Spanish, because I really do read the way a third grader does, mouthing the words. That takes a long time! — Sandra Cisneros

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

I can't stand it when people say, "If you're writing a novel, you should read this and that." Because it's like giving someone another person's prescription. How do you know that's what they need? — Sandra Cisneros

This is a vision Kaufman and Broad shares with Henry Cisneros, and together we have the resources and expertise to make vital new neighborhoods a reality. — Bruce Karatz

When I'm starting to feel, "How many more people are there?" I go slower. I ask questions, and that person engaging with me gives me energy. — Sandra Cisneros

Think about the books that you were reading at a certain crisis in your life, what you were reading, and that's because you needed them to nourish your alma. — Sandra Cisneros

Perhaps the greatest challenge has been trying to keep my time to myself and my private life private in order to do my job. Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now. — Sandra Cisneros

I think that you need to have books that talk about the lives of the poor, and they need to be involved - involved in acquisitions. — Sandra Cisneros

We can have our hearts broken over so much more. It is important to recognize the full spectrum of heartbreak. We can be heartbroken by lost and by disappointment. But heartbreak is not just this negative image we see, it's not this terrible experience that brings no benefits. — Sandra Cisneros

I grew up with this kind of grocery store that caters to the poor. They serve you the worst food — Sandra Cisneros

We are told by media - books, television, reality shows - that heartbreak is this terrible thing and yet we should seek it. We're told that heartbreak is all about love and we should just go after that high over and over again. We are told it is healthy to be addicted to this kind of behavior and the highs associated with love. But, that's not all what heartbreak is. — Sandra Cisneros

I feel that I can teach my listener about a new word they can use too. — Sandra Cisneros

I'm filled with a new joy mixed with old grief. — Sandra Cisneros

The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. — Sandra Cisneros

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges. — Sandra Cisneros

Every writer I admire is my teacher. If you look at it, and if you care to read carefully enough and to read and reread a text, you teach yourself something about craft. — Sandra Cisneros

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less. — Sandra Cisneros

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction." — Sandra Cisneros

God made men by baking them in an oven, but he forgot about the first batch, and that's how Black people were born. And then he was so anxious about the next batch, he took them out of the oven too soon, so that's how White people were made. But the third batch he let cook until they were golden-golden-golden, and, honey, that's you and me. — Sandra Cisneros

You know how sometimes you're talking to people who love you and give you unconditional love, and you say, "But you know what? Let me back up. I forgot to say ... "You can do that, right? You don't hesitate and say, "Oh my God! I forgot to say that!". You just speak! And you say it all, until you have nothing more to say. And that's your first draft. It's done. — Sandra Cisneros

In English, my name means hope. In Spanish, it means too many letters. It means sadness. It means waiting. It is like the number nine, a muddy color. — Sandra Cisneros

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

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

I think that we need to measure how we give dollars to libraries by need. And the communities that are poor, in my opinion, should get more because you have to do more outreach. — Sandra Cisneros

My trainer taught me, because he's Iranian, and that's a beautiful snack [pistachios]. I have some with me, actually, in my bag. You could eat that on a plane instead of the salted nuts. And a serving size a day is the size of your hand, not the size of your head! — Sandra Cisneros

I don't know what the definition of a short story is, and I don't even care to answer that question. That's something somebody in academia would think about. I just want to tell a story, and if people listen, and if it stays with you, it's a story. — Sandra Cisneros

Now I feel life is really short and I have to take care of things. — Sandra Cisneros

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

Place-based initiatives can provide a useful framework to judge our progress in raising people out of poverty. They allow us to see whether or not a neighborhood is improving and its residents are living better. — Henry Cisneros

There are some benefits [that illegal aliens] clearly ought not have ... [including] health benefits and welfare benefits and others that serve as a magnet attracting people here from other countries. — Henry Cisneros

World Screen provides clear, insightful reporting on the most critical and complex issues of our industry. It combines local savvy with a global perspective, and it is an important source of information. — Gustavo Cisneros

I usually meditate and I call my spirit allies - anyone in the spirit world that I've got connections with. Even in the spirit world you need connections! — Sandra Cisneros

I think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw, and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart. — Sandra Cisneros

The cancer doesn't bother me. I have great faith that the technology will beat it. — Henry Cisneros

If you just breathe, and go slower, you will have enough energy. It's really important because there are people who wait in line, and your work has changed their lives. You will need to listen to them because they are also going to feed you and give you confirmation of the prayer you asked before you spoke. — Sandra Cisneros

I have to get my will in order. I have to get the Macondo Foundation going. I want to invest the money and resources that I've gotten from working so hard so that it's shared and it has its life beyond me. — Sandra Cisneros

We have to be honest, we have to be truthful and speak to the one dirty secret in American life, and that is racism. — Henry Cisneros

The devil knows more from experience than from being the devil — Sandra Cisneros

As Secretary of Housing, I do have to express alarm, signal the alarm if you will, that the potential for homelessness to grow is there. — Henry Cisneros

People like to blame Mexican food, but look at what's happening globally, look at all the fast foods and products filled with trans fat. Before the Mexican Revolution, a hundred years ago, people were eating what now macrobiotics tells us to eat, corn, black beans, rice. That's what people were eating - and chile peppers. That's a healthy diet. — Sandra Cisneros

Like piles of dry wood with red-hot coals underneath. — Henry Cisneros

I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer. — Sandra Cisneros

There's all kinds of ways to wean yourself off of sugar - because it is like an addiction. — Sandra Cisneros

To tell you the truth, I think it's about that we shouldn't get our driver's licenses till real late in life. — Sandra Cisneros

If educators were really understanding of that, they'd say, "You know what? Forget about bilingual, we're going to do multilingual education." So children are ready for the new millennium. We're way behind compared to countries in Europe. If we were multilingual, imagine how much you would learn about your own culture, about the sensibilities of what's important in your own culture. — Sandra Cisneros

The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations. — Sandra Cisneros

I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes. — Sandra Cisneros

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet. — Sandra Cisneros

The government makes use of the clergy as of one arm more, which, however, is now almost powerless through corruption. The Oriental church has no conception of the noble devotion which has honored Catholicism in the lives of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Cardinal Cisneros. The — Emilia Pardo Bazan

Even though it's hard to believe, but people who know me really well know I'm shy. I have to go past that fear. — Sandra Cisneros

You know how they say, "Find your voice"? That's your voice, in your pajamas. And it doesn't mean that you're going to publish it or print it or people are going to see you in your pajamas. It just means you are going to construct the foundation in your pajamas, in that voice. — Sandra Cisneros

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning. — Sandra Cisneros

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today. — Sandra Cisneros

There [DreamTigers by Jorge Luis Borges] were these little fablesque things, you know, dream tigers, beautiful, beautiful pieces that when you read them had the power of a long piece, but they were prose, and they had the power of poetry, in that the last line wasn't the end, it was a reverberation, like when you tap on a glass made of crystal, and it goes ping. — Sandra Cisneros

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

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

Well, when you're an immigrant writer, or an immigrant, you're not always welcome to this country unless you're the right immigrant. If you have a Mexican accent, people look at you like, you know, where do you come from and why don't you go back to where you came from? So, even though I was born in the United States, I never felt at home in the United States. I never felt at home until I moved to the Southwest, where, you know, there's a mix of my culture with the U.S. culture, and that was why I lived in Texas for 25 years. — Sandra Cisneros

If you start thinking about who's going to read it [you're writing], or what grade will you get, or is it going to win that award, or are you going to get into this graduate program, you're blocking the light, and the light is that guidance and love we get when we open up our hearts and are guided by our higher selves, or God, or the Buddha Lupe [Buddha and the Virgin of Guadalupe fused together, as they are in the tattoo on Sandra's right arm], or whatever you believe in, or love. — Sandra Cisneros

Like all guests, after a fortnight, grief is best beyond the door. — Sandra Cisneros

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

I don't think we have any time to waste. — Henry Cisneros

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

I grew up listening to the Beatles and being an ardent Beatles fan when I was in third grade all the way to adulthood, and listening to all kinds of music that came to us either at the flea market or in our living rooms or on the 'Ed Sullivan' show - all these places we were influenced by. — Sandra Cisneros

Believe me, that nap is better than sitting there for three hours and nothing's coming. I've learned that even if I've slept nine hours and I just finished breakfast, if I feel sleepy when I'm in front of that computer, I'll take a nap. And it really does help. — Sandra Cisneros

There are two things you need to ask for, to open up that channel, so you get the light. One is humility, because our ego is always going to block that guidance, and so you ask for humility.And the second thing you're going to ask for is courage, because what you're going to be asked to do is bigger than what you think you can do. — Sandra Cisneros