Top 60 Sandra Cisneros Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are.”

— Sandra Cisneros

2. “The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.”

— Sandra Cisneros

3. “When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that’s when it’s powerful.”

— Sandra Cisneros

4. “I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.”

— Sandra Cisneros

5. “You can never have too much sky.”

— Sandra Cisneros

6. “Write about what makes you different.”

— Sandra Cisneros

7. “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

8. “The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself. It’s like being blind. You aren’t less of a person, but you’re missing out on wonderful things.”

— Sandra Cisneros

9. “The older I get, the more I’m conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn’t it?”

— Sandra Cisneros

10. “The thoughts of letting go of everything I love overwhelms like a tsunami of sorrow.”

— Sandra Cisneros

11. “I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.”

— Sandra Cisneros

12. “The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.”

— Sandra Cisneros

13. “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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “I’m filled with a new joy mixed with old grief.”

— Sandra Cisneros

18. “But I deal with this by meditating and by understanding I’ve been put on the planet to serve humanity. I have to remind myself to live simply and not overindulge, which is a constant battle in a material world.”

— Sandra Cisneros

19. “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

20. “I think diseases have no eyes. They pick with a dizzy finger anyone, just anyone.”

— Sandra Cisneros

21. “When you have your heart broken wide, you are also open to things of beauty as well as things of sadness. Once people are not here physically, the spiritual remains, we still connect, we can communicate, we can give and receive love and forgiveness. There is love after someone dies.”

— Sandra Cisneros

22. “I wish somebody had told me love does not die, that we can continue to receive and give love after death.”

— Sandra Cisneros

23. “One press account said I was an overnight success. I thought that was the longest night I’ve ever spent.”

— Sandra Cisneros

24. “I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don’t have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.”

— Sandra Cisneros

25. “Generally if you’re a daughter in a Mexican family, no one wants to tell you anything; they tell you the healthy lies about your family.”

— Sandra Cisneros

26. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

27. “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

28. “Everything that is most mine belongs to everyone now.”

— Sandra Cisneros

29. “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

30. “I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.”

— Sandra Cisneros

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Even if we don’t know if God exists, we can be certain love exists, because its power transcends death.”

— Sandra Cisneros

35. “I didn’t intend to be writing – the writer’s life. I was just writing what came to me at the time, but it is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find, not a room of her own, but a house of her own.”

— Sandra Cisneros

36. “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

37. “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

38. “I didn’t marry. I didn’t have children. I followed the food supply for jobs. I kept writing at night. And that kept me moving. It kept my life disruptive. It broke up many relationships. Was it worth it? Yes.”

— Sandra Cisneros

39. “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

40. “The house was immaculate, as always, not a stray hair anywhere, not a flake of dandruff or a crumpled towel. Even the roses on the dining-room table held their breath. A kind of airless cleanliness that always made me want to sneeze.”

— Sandra Cisneros

41. “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

42. “Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in.”

— Sandra Cisneros

43. “The devil knows more from experience than from being the devil.”

— Sandra Cisneros

44. “I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.”

— Sandra Cisneros

45. “Revenge only engenders violence, not clarity and true peace. I think liberation must come from within.”

— Sandra Cisneros

46. “Maybe all pain in the world requires poetry.”

— Sandra Cisneros

47. “I have to say that the traditional role is kind of a myth. I think the traditional Mexican woman is a fierce woman.”

— Sandra Cisneros

48. “I think people should read fairy tales, because were hungry for a mythology that will speak to our fears.”

— Sandra Cisneros

49. “I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.”

— Sandra Cisneros

50. “I was raised in Chicago, so always used Latina. It’s what my Father and brothers called ourselves, when we meant the entire Spanish-speaking community of Chicago.”

— Sandra Cisneros