Sandra Cisneros Community Quotations

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.

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.

Before you speak, get very quiet, do the meditation, say, "Use me as a channel for what needs to get said to this community. This community needs to hear something very important that I'm the only person in the room who can say it. Please help open me so that I'm not frightened and speak through me. Let me be that channel so that I can help heal." You make yourself so humble that you really are like a flute and that music that comes out comes from el corazón. All the people you're connected to from that light that we call love.

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.

I realize that it's like spices in the kitchen. I need that turmeric. I'm sorry, but cinnamon isn't going to substitute . I feel that I can teach my listener about a new word they can use too. "Well, what words are part of my own community, even if I'm monolingual, that I'm not allowing myself to use in a public sphere?"

By community I mean that community you have a special vision for, that only you see, that no one else in a room sees. That special community in pain, that through a pain you've suffered, you're able to have that vision, that super-ray vision.

One way to get very humble is to dedicate the work you're going to do to your community.

Marshall Rosenberg talks about how we can create peace in the communities we work with. He's been traveling to warring nations to create peace within those countries.

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.

Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater.

There's a lot of things that haven't been communicated to our communities. I didn't know these things myself. I didn't know that if you ate cheap food, it was like buying cheap gasoline, and there was a reason why after an hour you get headaches, or youhypoglycemic.

Perhaps the community you mentioned might not come to the story. Sometimes you have to take the story to them, and perform it, and that's another way that I get an alternate point of view that isn't the official version of history out to a community. I feel that's what I've been doing since Caramelo.

I know the American Library Association has models for working with the poor. They do have that, and I think that we really need to put our efforts - if we want to think long-range and invest in the community so that we don't have to, you know, invest in prisons - into making a change, because I know that the library can make a change in a life, because it made a change in mine.