Sandra Cisneros Quotes

Okay, we didn’t work, and all memories to tell you the truth aren’t good. But sometimes there were good times. Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be stars for great wars like ours.

If I am a witch, then so be it, I said. And I took to eating black things - huitlacoche the corn mushroom, coffee, dark chiles, the bruised part of fruit, the darkest, blackest things to make me hard and strong.

Everywhere I go, it's me and me. Half of me living my life, the other half watching me live it.

What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

We're going to right the world and live. I mean live our lives the way lives were meant to be lived. With the throat and wrists. With rage and desire, and joy and grief, and love till it hurts, maybe. But goddamn, girl. Live.

You can never have too much sky . You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies too are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don't look down at all except to be content to live on hills.

You're in love with my mind/But sometimes, sweetheart, a woman needs a man who loves her ass.

A House of My Own Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after. Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.

We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky.

I'm not saying I'm not bad. I'm not saying I'm special. But I'm not like the Allport Street girls, who stand in doorways and go with men into alleys. All I know is I didn't want it like that. Not against the bricks or hunkering in somebody's car. I wanted it come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver

Once you tell a man he's pretty, there's no taking it back. They think they're pretty all the time, and I suppose, in a way, they are. It's got to do with believing it.

She has many troubles, but the big one is her husband who left and keeps leaving.

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.

My sky, my life, my eyes. Let me look at you. Before you open those eyes of yours. The days to come, the days gone by. Before we go back to what we’ll always be.

And the sea trickling out of my eye as if I'd always carried it inside me, like a seashell waiting to be cupped to an ear.

You can never have too much sky . You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain…I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.

In the Bay, whenever I got depressed, I always drove out to the Ocean Beach. Just to sit. And, I don't know, something about looking at water, how it just goes and goes and goes, something about that I found very soothing. As if somehow I were connected to every ripple that was sending itself out and out until it reached another shore.

One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumbling. Rats? they'll ask. Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy.

I have inherited her name but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.” -The house on Mango Street

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much.

Butterflies are too few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

Instead, I got mad, and anger when it's used to act, when used nonviolently, has power.

She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.

Seems like the world is spinning smooth without a bump or squeak except when love comes in. Then the whole machine just quits like a loud load of wash on imbalance--the buzzer singing to high heave, the danger light flashing.

I have decided not to grow up tamed like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.” -The House on Mango Street

I want to be like the waves on the sea, like the clouds in the wind, but I'm me. One day I'll jump out of my skin. I'll shake the sky like a hundred violins.

the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing

But when I look at this work, I see in that tree, hoarded like rain, all the love a man could feel for a woman in one brief life.

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 les

Sandra Cisneros,

Alone, all alone in the world, sad and small like a nightingale serenading the infinite. How could a love so tender and sweet become the cross of my pain? No, no, I can't conceive I won't receive your precious lips again. My eyes are tired of weeping, my heart of beating. If perhaps some crystal moment before dawn or twilight you remember me, bring only a bouquet of tears to lay upon my thirsty grave.

Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away? They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.

Little thorn in my soul, pebble in my shoe, jewel of my life, the passionate doll who has torn my heart in two, tell me, cruel beauty that I adore, why you torment me. I have the misfortune of being both poor and without your affection. When the hope of your caresses flowered in my soul, happiness blossomed in my tomorrows. But now that you have yanked my golden dreams from me, I shiver from this chalice of pain like a tender white flower tossed in rain. Return my life to me, and end this absurd pain. If not, Rogelio Velasco will have loved in vain.

I teach poetry to teens, and I always include a picture of the poet on the handout. I want my readers to see Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni. I want them to know what Sandra Cisneros, Natalie Diaz, and Patricia Smith look like. Some will see their reflections looking back at them, others won't. Both are important. Who makes the work is just as important as the work made.

I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don’t look down except to be content to live on hills. One day I’ll own my own house but I will not forget who I am or where I came from.” - The House on Mango Street

When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be.

Everything is holding its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. Not this way, every evening talking to the trees, leaning out my window, imagining what I can't see.

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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.

Pídele a casi cualquier chicana o chicano fuera de la academia que nombre a una mujer famosa de origen mexicano y probablemente vas a escuchar "Dolores Huerta". Si la persona conoce a nuestras escritoras contemporáneas, quizá mencione a "Sandra Cisneros" o "Ana Castillo". Si preguntas por un nombre de los primeros tiempos, te podrán decir Sor Juana, la monja rebelde de los mil seiscientos. Cuando trates de profundizar, la persona a tu lado tal vez va a decir, "iMe doy por vencido!, pero, bueno... ahí está la Virgen de Guadalupe, que creo, está en muchísimas camisetas. Era inevitable entonces, que la necesidad de un libro como este sea finalmente reconocida. Ask almost anyone outside of academia to name famous US women of Mexican origin and you will probably hear ‘Dolores Huerta.’ If the person knows our contemporary writers, maybe ‘Sandra Cisneros’ and ‘Ana Castillo.’ If you ask for a name from earlier times, you might get ‘Sor Juana’-the rebel nun of the 1600’s. When you try to dig deeper, your companion may whimper, ‘I give up! Well…there’s the Virgin of Guadalupe, she’s on a lot of T-shirts. It was inevitable, then, that the need for a book like this would be recognized.

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. —Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.

Americanah; Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents; Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street; Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; Teju Cole, Open City; William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying; Nell Freudenberger, The Newlyweds; Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban and King of Cuba; Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker.

Now consider the writers we turn to during events promoting diversity—events such as Multicultural Authors Week and Black History Month. These writers usually include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Amy Tan, and Sandra Cisneros. We go to these writers for the black or Asian perspective; Toni Morrison is always seen as a black writer, not just a writer. But when we are not looking for the black or Asian perspective, we return to white writers, reinforcing the idea of whites as just human, and people of color as particular kinds (racialized) of humans. This also allows white (male) writers to be seen as not having an agenda or any particular perspective, while racialized (and gendered) writers do.

To use an example from school, consider the writers we are all expected to read; the list usually includes Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and William Shakespeare. These writers are seen as representing the universal human experience, and we read them precisely because they are presumed to be able to speak to us all. Now consider the writers we turn to during events promoting diversity—events such as Multicultural Authors Week and Black History Month. These writers usually include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Amy Tan, and Sandra Cisneros. We go to these writers for the black or Asian perspective; Toni Morrison is always seen as a black writer, not just a writer.

I came to admire at all angles a sculpture that speaks of the sacred, not of the mundane. Of that moment when two beings kiss and are infinite.

We didn't always live on Mango Street.

Hogar. Hogar. Hogar es una casa en una fotografía.

Sylvia Plath's achingly powerful The Bell Jar weaves her personal battle with depression into the tapestry of fiction. Ned Vizzini's best-selling It's Kind of a Funny Story was inspired by his own psychiatric hospitalization. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, contains

Sandra Cisneros, Richard Vasquez, people like that. I asked Nick if he’d ever read Octavio Prado.” “I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.” “He wrote this book, Lake of the Moon, about growing up in Fresno.