Feminists

"Sandra Cisneros's stories are pure poetry."

"All poets would do well to follow the example of Sandra Cisneros, who takes no prisoners and has not made a single compromise in her language."

"Sandra Cisneros has a gift and an attitude we should all be grateful for."

"A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction. The writings of Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich, among others, played a major role in bringing the feminist message and perspective to the masses of American women."

"Sandra Cisneros…has done so much to help other writers…There had been some earlier Chicano works, like Pocho, a novel that came out in 1959. But none of these earlier works really made an impact that showed that there was a great demand for Chicano literature. I think Sandra Cisneros made inroads there…Sandra wasn't the earliest Chicana writer either. But she was the one who stimulated the interest in Chicano and Chicana writing."

"the poem "Poet's Progress" is to Sandra, reflecting on our lives...There is a great satisfaction that comes from being in the life that one has chosen. When I say, "Save me from a stupid life," I mean an unquestioned life, those unexamined choices that Sandra and I were both expected to make. We both chose poetry, which, to me, is the exact opposite of the stupid life."

"At all times, Sandra Cisneros has penned poetry of utterly divine language and imagery."

"Sandra Cisneros is one of the most brilliant of today's young writers. Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful. It is rich with music and picture.""

"A sensitive, compassionate witness, Cisneros re-creates the neighborhood in which she grew up, evoking the smells and tastes and feelings. The effects of sexism, poverty, racism, and the loss of culture and language are told with searing simplicity…Cisneros's telling is relentless, clear in its simplicity. Her anger is palpable, but no words of anger are actually written. Experiences about race and class and sex are put into word pictures. The entrapment of women is drawn in big, thick lines across the page. Sobreviviendo, bearing witness, out of love, so that what has been (and still is) will not be erased. The stories are pieced together like a quilt, arranged so that women can see how it is and has been, can see the lines of connection between themselves as women, as Chicanas, as poor people in the barrio, can think about how they might want it to be, how they could get there. That Cisneros, like Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks, chose to piece her stories like a quilt speaks to the significance of the quilting process as a way of thinking. "Each day is a tapestry," Deena Metzger has written, the piecing a reflection of the structure of daily life."

"I would never want to offend any writer by publicly admitting which books I’ve put down; it’s not the writer’s fault we didn’t click. Maybe the book arrived too early or too late in my life. If I sense a book isn’t likely to make me a better writer or a better human being, I release it. I have to. At 66 I haven’t got a lot of time left before I transmogrify into a maguey."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"For me the great shame and dolor of our times is the story of immigrant children."

"It’s important that young people find the right books that speak to them at the right time, otherwise you might be encouraging them to dislike reading."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) Luis Rodriguez, Edwidge Danticat, Natalie Diaz, Rigoberto González, Virginia Grise, Joy Harjo, Helena Maria Viramontes, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Denise Chávez, Manuel Muñoz, Dorothy Allison, Levi Romero, John Phillip Santos, Charles M. Blow, Jorge Ramos, Carmen Aristegui, Elena Poniatowska, Luis Alfaro and every Mexican journalist who puts their life in danger by writing the truth. And, I hear a chavalo named Lin-Manuel in New York is pretty good."

"I’m on a mission to make up for the huge gaps in my miseducation as a woman of color...At this point in my life, I want to read the classics from the Americas, from Mexico, from women, from the working class, from the Indigenous communities, from everyone who hasn’t been allowed to the podium before."

"Even if a language disappears, I believe a worldview, a syntax, a cadence survives from which the conquering language builds upon, like the stones the Spanish conquistadores gathered from the Indigenous temples to build their Catholic churches. Something like that is happening in our poetic inheritance. Something old and ancient and sacred survives in the spoken word, which is fascinating for those of us who are word-workers."

"Books are medicine. What heals me may not be the right prescription for anyone else."

"Working-class women's literature, women of color, specifically Latina women's writing like my friend Ana Castillo's, or my friend Cherrie Moraga's, Helena Viramontes's, Elena Poniatowska's, and Marguerite Duval's sends me all the way to my typewriter as much as Manuel Puig's stories."

"Language is much better than throwing stones; language is much, much stronger."

"my favorite writers are, right now Merce Rodoreda, Grace Paley, Juan Rulfo, Manuel Puig, Marguerite Duras - these are my favorite writers. I'm trying to reach that world level. I think that we should always aim for that level."

"In Chicana writing the love between a grandmother and a granddaughter is holier than the relationship between a mother and a daughter because the mother and daughter have to deal with the reality of the everyday, whereas the grandmother can be revered from afar. Especially if she’s dead, she becomes this mythic symbol in Chicana literature."

"Of course I like to write about love, but then I’ll ask, how is Mexican love different from American love? I’ll look at the Mexican models of love, and that leads me to the true Mexican love. 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."

"I like living in a town not dominated by cars. I like living in a small community where artists from around the world come and go. I like living in a town with big sky and big clouds, and where you can connect with things of the spirit easily. It’s both stimulating and peaceful all at once. It makes me want to write."

"I don’t take it personally. It has nothing to do with me, or with my book. The book is being taught because it is telling a story that has spiritual resonance at this time in history. It is serving a need, it is doing its healing, it is transmitting light, but I was just the conduit for that light, not the source. I am grateful that the timing was right for my labor to be recognized, and that the readers were ready to hear this story at this time. I am fortunate and blessed to be the flute, but I recognize and acknowledge I am not the music."

"The only reason we write—well, the only reason why I write; maybe I shouldn’t generalize—is so that I can find out something about myself. Writers have this narcissistic obsession about how we got to be who we are. I have to understand my ancestors—my father, his mother and her mother—to understand who I am. It all leads back to the narcissistic pleasure of discovering yourself."

"If I had to speak about anything that was difficult in my life now looking back at it, I would say the most difficult part was how the world made you feel about being poor, about being a girl. And, later, how painful it was navigating the world as a young woman. A lot of times I found myself in disastrous situations because I was such an innocent/idiot. It left me damaged as a human being for decades. I think having been beautiful was a cross, and I’m grateful I’m no longer young and no longer beautiful in that same way."

"It’s memorable because it makes you either laugh or cry. If a story’s really good, it does both. Sometimes it’s not the story’s fault if it doesn’t stay with you, because you’re too old or too young for it. I feel that, in the Native American sense, the story cycles; there are different times of your life that a story may come to you. You don’t remember it, and then you hear. it again or read it again later in your life, and because of what’s happened in your life it’s distinct from the first time you heard it."

"I think we are all gifted as children, but we aren’t gifted with the same gifts. In crowded, poor schools, an overwhelmed teacher can’t always help us discover what our gifts are. I am grateful my mom was a frustrated artist. At home we drew murals, created puppet shows, had craft hours, went to the library, visited museums. I’m certain without my mom, I wouldn’t have been an artist today."

"I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It’s a door that opens to an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly, as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me. It just happens."

"I really liked Isabelle Allende's House of the Spirits...But I also think that their [her and Garcia Márquez's] sense of indigenous people and the land is very limited. It has been pointed out that Allende uses this sort of mythos, the Indian people, as part of the novel, but they don't really appear in her work as people, as full beings."

"The New York Times Book Review said of Isabel Allende that she is "the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists." Her voice stands out as a spectacular outcry of the "magically real." Like the Argentine novelist Luisa Valenzuela, she has inherited the spellbound qualities of the "Boom," the literary explosion of the 1960s, when a group of young Latin American writers brought new dimensions and vitality to the Spanish language. Her characters, mostly women, move between the supernatural and the everyday life with extraordinary ease…Meeting Isabel Allende and listening to her is a rewarding experience. She tells her story in an unpretentious way, insisting on the fact that she knows nothing about literature. We fall under her charm and we can see why her characters talk the way they do: with persuasion and magic, and in a natural and straightforward manner."

"I come from the so-called Third World," wrote the Chilean novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende after September 11, 2001, a day that also marked the twenty-eighth anniversary of a U.S.-sponsored coup d'état against her uncle, Salvador Allende. Still, she writes, "Until only a short time ago, if someone had asked me where I'm from, I would have answered, without much thought, Nowhere; or, Latin America; or, maybe, In my heart I'm Chilean. Today, however, I say I'm an American, not simply because that's what my passport verifies, or because that word includes all of America from north to south, or because my husband, my son, my grandchildren, most of my friends, my books, and my home are in northern California; but because a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and starting with that instant, many things have changed. We can't be neutral in moments of crisis...I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States."

"I liked House of the Spirits a lot, but I wouldn't say it influenced me. A sort of brotherly - or should I say sisterly - relationship can certainly be found between House of the Spirits and Tree of Life. This year I experimented with a course entitled "Do women of the Americas have a common literature?" I selected Allende, Marita Golden... and of course Tree of Life. However, I cannot say that I consider Isabel Allende a major writer. It seems to me that as a writer, she is less comprehensive, less accomplished than Garcia Marquez."

"Already many critics accuse Allende of imitating Garcia Márquez' novel, especially because she writes about a Latin American family, the Truebas, who, just like the Buendia family of the Colombian author, inhabit a world of magic and eccentric spirits. But Isabel Allende differs from García Márquez: she writes a feminocentric saga of free-spirited women who not only play the piano with the cover closed or make objects levitate, but also participate openly in the fight against tyranny and repression...With this book Isabel Allende joins the many spirited women who have chosen to speak for the voiceless and have had the courage to denounce the wrongdoings of their countries. She has written this novel so that all of us can remember the story of a country like Chile which had a freely elected government that was never given a chance to rule. (And there are parallels between the experience of Chile and that of other Latin American nations such as Nicaragua and El Salvador.) The House of the Spirits reclaims Chile's right to exist on its own terms. Allende writes this story because she does not want the humane and generous Chile to be forgotten. The House of the Spirits, then, is not only Chile but a metaphor for a besieged Latin America."

"My work as a journalist has been fundamental in my literary creations. Journalism taught me to know and love words, the tools of my trade, the material of my craft. Journalism taught me to search for truth and to try to be objective, how to capture the reader and to hold him firmly and not let him escape. It taught me to synthesize ideas and to be precise about events. And above all, it rid me of any fear of the blank page."

"Democratic values have never disappeared from Chile. We must not confuse the Chilean nation with the dictatorship that is ruling it now. Chile is its people, its land, its past, its present, and its future. Pinochet and the evil ones who are with him are an accident in the long life of my country. They will go into history as a misfortune that darkened the sky, but they will go."

"When I left Chile, after the military coup, I lost in one instant my family, my past, my home. I felt like a tree without roots, destined to dry up and die. For many years I was paralyzed by a kind of stupor and by nostalgia, but one day in January of 1981, I decided to recover what I had lost. I sat down to write the story of a family similar to mine, the story of a country that could be mine, a continent resembling Latin America... It was almost the act of a conjurer."

"I do realize that human beings are the same everywhere; the differences are not so great. This story of the Trueba family could have happened anywhere."

"(About The House of Spirits) All the women in my book are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfill themselves, not to be dependent on men."

"I visualized the book as a string of beads. Each anecdote, each character, was a separate bead strung on one string. That is why I wanted to close the book where it began, as if one had fastened the clasp of a necklace. I also wanted to show that life goes in a circle, that events are intertwined, and that history repeats itself. There is no beginning and no end."

"Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality. I feel that all things float within the realm of the possible. As a reader I let myself be carried away by the enchantment of a story, without worrying too much about its authenticity. As a writer I abandon myself in the same way to the necessity of telling, convinced that if something is not exactly true at this moment, it may be so tomorrow. That's the way I have found it to be in my work."

"When I write, I fly to another dimension. Like Eva Luna, I try to live life as I would like it to be, as in a novel. I am always half flying, like Marc Chagall's violinists."

"I don't pretend to be anyone's voice. I have been very lucky to be published in Europe, and I say lucky because there are women who have been writing in Latin America since the seventeenth century, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The problem is that few people ever talk about them. Their work is rarely taught at the universities, there is no literary criticism on them, and they are not published, translated or distributed."

"For me, feminism is a fight that men and women must wage for a more educated world, one in which the basic inequality between the sexes will be eliminated. We have to change the patriarchal, hierarchical, authoritarian, repressive societies that have been marked by the religions and the laws that we have had to live with for thousands of years. This goes a lot deeper than not wearing a bra, or the sexual and cultural revolutions. It is a revolution that must go to the heart of the world, and that all of us must fight, women and men alike. Both sexes are on a ship without a course, and we must give it a new direction."

"The political future of Chile is a democracy, without a doubt."

"The written word is an act of human solidarity. I write so that people will love each other more."

"I acknowledge that One Hundred Years, like the works of Borges, Cortázar, Donoso, Neruda, Amado, among others, opened the road for me."

"The first person to name that movement "Magical Realism," to give a label to that, was Alejo Carpentier...he abandoned the surrealists and searched in our roots, in our history, in our legends, in our folklore. He was the first one to label it. And it was wonderful because it was like giving permission to other writers to finally use their own voices. Because before that our writers were always trying to imitate Europeans, or North Americans, and were denying all our Indian background, our African influence, our own languages, and legends, and myths. This was just an open door for all that. I think that was the beginning of the Boom. That really gave a lot of people permission to do anything. But it's not a literary device, it's part of our life. The magic is still there. Because magic, in my case, stands for emotions...Maybe we deal with them in different forms, but we all feel them in the same way (1990)"

"The best literature in this country now is being written by minorities, black women first, Chinese Americans, Chicanos, Japanese-Americans. These people are writing wonderful literature that totally defies the standards of WASP literature that is always in the New York Times, and I love it. (1990)"

"There is a wonderful sentence, a statement, by one of Bertolt Brecht's characters, he says: "I am that man that goes around with a brick in his hand, to show the world how his house was." And that's the way I feel about my books in a way, that they are my bricks. I can show people what I believe my world was, so I've not lost it. (1990)"