Literary Birthday – 20 December – Sandra Cisneros

Happy Birthday, Sandra Cisneros, born on 20 December 1954.

Sandra Cisneros Quotes

1. 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?
2. To write is to ask questions. It doesn’t matter if the answers are true or puro cuento. After all and everything only the story is remembered, and the truth fades away like the pale blue ink on a cheap embroidery pattern
3. I realise 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.
4. 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.
5. They say the fluttering wings of a butterfly can disrupt the weather on the other side of the world. Climbing uphill carrying the sun, I thought of this. How I am sensitive as water, wind. So are we all, all human beings, all things human or otherwise.
6. The more you speak more languages, the more you understand about yourself.
7. All of my work is influenced by fairy tales, and I hope my work shows Hans Christian Andersen’s influence.
8. Writing is like sewing together what I call these ‘buttons’, these bits and pieces.
9. For a writer, for the solitude to write, you don’t need a room of your own, you need a house.
10. The truth, these stories are nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered together to make something new. I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies. If, in the course of my inventing, I have inadvertently stumbled on the truth, perdonenme.

Sandra Cisneros is an American novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and poet. She is best known for her novella The House on Mango Street and her short story collections Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life. Her novel, Martita, I Remember You, was released in 2021. Cisneros was awarded the National Medal of Arts (2015) by U.S. Pres. Barack Obama. Her other honours include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2022) and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award (2025) from the National Book Critics Circle.

Source for image: ksm36, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SandraCisneros.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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