"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."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"You bring out the Mexican in me.
The hunkered thick dark spiral.
The core of a heart howl.
The bitter bile.
The tequila lágrimas on Saturday all
through next weekend Sunday.
You are the one I’d let go the other loves for
surrender my one-woman house.
Allow you red wine in bed,
even with my vintage lace linens.
Maybe. Maybe.
For you.
Quiero ser tuya. Only yours. Only you.
Quiero amarte. Atarte. Amarrarte.
Love the way a Mexican woman loves. Let
me show you . Love the only way I know how."
— Sandra Cisneros (Loose Woman: Poems)

"...never have to think who likes and doesn't like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strong because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Only a house, quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"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."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you've eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. You open your eyes and everything's just like yesterday, only it's today. And you are--underneath the year that make you eleven.
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five. And maybe one day when you're all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you're three, and that's okay. That's what I tell Mama when she's sad and needs to cry. Maybe she's feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree truck or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That's how being eleven years old is."
— Sandra Cisneros (Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories)

"I'm a witch woman- high on tobacco and holy water. I'm a woman delighted with her disasters. They give me something to do. A profession of sorts...I have the magic of words. The power to charm and kill at will."
— Sandra Cisneros

"You can't erase who you are. You can't erase what you know."
— Sandra Cisneros (La Casa En Mango Street/The House on Mango Street)

"One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. "
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"They say I'm a macha, hell on wheels, viva-la-vulva, fire and brimstone, man-hating, devastating, boogey-woman lesbian. Not necessarily, but I love the complement."
— Sandra Cisneros

"With you I'm useless with words. As if somehow I had to learn to speak all over again, as if the words I needed haven't been invented yet. "
— Sandra Cisneros (Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories)

"In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

""If blood is thicker than water, then menstruation is thicker than brotherhood." "
— Sandra Cisneros

"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 the 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."
— Sandra Cisneros (La Casa En Mango Street/The House on Mango Street)

""I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate." Chapter 35, pg. 89"
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn't know what she meant. -"Born Bad""
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

""I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.""
— Sandra Cisneros

""And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. 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." Chapter 4, pg. 11"
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"The father wants the girl to be a weather girl on television, or to marry and have babies. She doesn't want to be a TV weather girl. Nor does she want to marry and have babies. Not yet. Maybe later, but there are so many other things she must do in her lifetime first. Travel. Learn how to dance the tango. Publish a book. Live in other cities. Win a National Endowment for the Arts award. See the Northern Lights. Jump out of a cake."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"From Caramelo, on Lala's family trips from Chicago to Mexico:

"The smell of diesel exhaust, the smell of somebody roasting coffee, the smell of hot corn tortillas along with the pat-pat of the women's hands making them, the sting of roasting chiles in your throat and in your eyes. Sometimes a smell in the morning, very cool and clean that makes you sad. And a night smell when the stars open white and soft like fresh bolillo bread.

Every year I cross the border, it's the same--my mind forgets. But my body always remembers."
— Sandra Cisneros

"And when I'm through
hurling words as big as stones,
slashing the air with my tongue,
detonating wives and
setting babies crying.

And when my lovers are finished
telling me -- You're nuts
Go screw yourself,
Stop yelling and speak English please!

After everything
that's breakable is broken,
the silence expensive,
the dial tone howling like my heart. "
— Sandra Cisneros

"After everything that's breakable is broken, the silence is expensive"
— Sandra Cisneros

"I want to know how love can grow irrevocable and prove the fable true.A love exists that gives. And won't take back what's given. "
— Sandra Cisneros

"I sleep with the cat
when no one will have me.
When I can't give it away
for love or money --

I telephone the ones
who used to love me.
Or try to lure the leery
into my pretty web.

I'm looney as a June bride.
Cold as a bruja's tit.
A pathetic bitch.
In short, an ordinary woman.
Grateful to excessiveness.

At the slightest tug of generousness,
I stick to the cyclop who takes me,
lets me pee on the carpet
and keeps me fed.

Have you seen this woman?
I am considered harmless.
Armed and dangerous.
But only to me. "
— Sandra Cisneros

""If you give me five dollars I will be your friend forever."

"
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumble.
Rats? they'll ask?
Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"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 (Caramelo)

"Who was it that said I was getting too old to play the games? Who was it I didn't listen to? I only remember that when the others ran I wanted to run too..."
— Sandra Cisneros (La Casa En Mango Street/The House on Mango Street)

"Life was cruel and hilarious all at once."
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"The devil knows more from experience than from being the devil"
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

""I am a writer. It is my job to think. I live my life facing backwards." "
— Sandra Cisneros

"Only trees and more trees and plenty of blue sky. And you could laugh, Sally. You could go to sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes and doesn't like you. You could close your eyes and you wouldn't have to worry what people said because you never belonged here anyway and nobody could make you sad and nobody would think you're strange because you like to dream and dream. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without somebody saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.
"
— Sandra Cisneros

"Yo los quiero junto, como los dedos de mis manos."
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"Someday I will have a best friend all my own."
— Sandra Cisneros (La Casa En Mango Street/The House on Mango Street)

"Rachel says that love is like a big black piano being pushed off the top of a three-story building and you're waiting on the bottom to catch it. But Lourdes says it's not that way at all. It's like a top, like all the colors in the world are spinning so fast they're not colors anymore and all that's left is a white hum.
There was a man, a crazy who lived upstairs from us when we lived on South Loomis. He couldn't talk, just walked around all day with his harmonica in his mouth. Didn't play it. Just sort of breathed through it, all day long, wheezing, in and out, in and out.
This is how it is with me. Love I mean."
— Sandra Cisneros (Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories)

"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."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

""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. They have nothing to do with last week's garbage or fear of rats. Night comes. Nothing wakes them but the wind." Chapter 34, pg. 86-87"
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"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. -"Bums in the Attic""
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Anger is contagious."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Tres vicios tengo y los tengo muy arraigados: de ser borracho, jugador, y enamorado..."
— Sandra Cisneros (Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories)

"She wants to write stories that ignore borders between genres, between written and spoken, between highbrow literature and children's nursery rhymes, between New York and the imaginary village of Macondo, between the U.S. and Mexico. It's true, she wants the writers she admires to respect her work, but she also wants people who don't usually read books to enjoy these stories too. She doesn't want to write a book that a reader won't understand and would feel ashamed for not understanding.

(from the Introduction in 25th Anniversary Edition)"
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"If truthful we must be, then it must be said he found everything in the universe sexually inviting. Woman. Man. Boy. Papaya. Crocheted potholder. The Milky Way. Any and all were possiblities, real or imagined."
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. 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."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"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."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)

"Until then I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor.
"
— Sandra Cisneros

"It is no disgrace to be poor - just inconvienent"
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"''You should've seen the terrible things that happened to me as a girl, but did i cry? Not even if god commanded it''"
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"I love them all the same. Just enough but not too much"
— Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo)

"Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too. She is very sassy."
— Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)