The House on Mango Street

by Sandra Cisneros

So that the sentences are pliant as branches and can be read in more ways than one.

We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

I cut apart and stitched together events to tailor the story, gave it shape so it had a beginning, middle, and end, because real life stories rarely come to us complete.

Emotions, though, can’t be invented, can’t be borrowed. All the emotions my characters feel, good or bad, are mine.

You can never have too much sky.

A boy held me once so hard, I swear, I felt the grip and weight of his arms, but it was a dream. Sire. How did you hold her? Was it? Like this? And when you kissed her? Like this?

Cheryl, who is not your friend anymore, not since last Tuesday before Easter, not since the day you made her ear bleed, not since she called you that name and bit a hole in your arm and you looked as if you were going to cry and everyone was waiting and you didn’t, you didn’t, Sally, not since then, you don’t have a best friend to lean against the schoolyard fence with, to laugh behind your hands at what the boys say. There is no one to lend you her hairbrush.

But when the kids are asleep after she’s fed them their pancake dinner, she writes poems on little pieces of paper that she folds over and over and holds in her hands a long time, little pieces of paper that smell like a dime.

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth.

Shame is a bad thing, you know. It keeps you down.