A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

by Sandra Cisneros

History, after all, is layer upon layer of stories. What one considers history depends on who is telling the story and what story they consider telling.

A house for me has been a lifelong dream. Owning one, having one, retreating to a space one can call one’s own, where a radio or TV isn’t blaring, and someone isn’t knocking on the other side of a door saying, “Come on out of there!”

If someone says hello, do I have to grin like a geisha? I like the military chin-flick of the men.

A house for me is this freedom to be.

I deserve stones. Better leave me the hell alone.

I am anomaly. Rare she who can’t stand kids and can’t stand you.

We all need a place to be. To cry without someone asking, “What’s wrong?” To laugh without explaining why.

“I like being alone, but I don’t like being lonely.”

A house for me is about permanence against the impermanence of the universe.

How come nobody told me an aria, a piece of stained glass, a painting, a sunset can be God too?

“Ya estoy cansado de vivir,

I’ve been searching for answers.

Is it too much to ask our leaders to lead?

I do know what I have to do. I will tell a story.

The book is the sum of our highest potential. Writers, alas, are the rough drafts.

What is left after so many goodbyes, after everything? After much pain, much fear?

You are a writer, you are a witness.

a writer can write of life only if they’ve experienced death.

For writers, the pen is our savior.

This is what I want. To believe one can write to change the world.

I’ve since been filled with a desire to travel somewhere that might explain and answer the question “Where are you from?” and, in turn, “Who are you?” Isn’t this why all writers write,

To me abandonment is worse than death.

have always been a daydreamer, and that’s a lucky thing for a writer. Because what is a daydreamer if not another word for thinker, visionary, intuitive—all wonderful words synonymous with “girl.”

She wants to write stories that ignore borders between genres,

stories are about beauty.

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

I never feel completely happy.

Is she really a writer, or is she only pretending to be a writer?

People saw a little girl when they looked at me and heard a little girl’s voice when I spoke.

For me, the library was a wonderful house. A house of ideas, a house of silence.

Hell was a kitchen.

“But if I don’t feel,” I said, “how will I be able to write?” I need to be able to feel things deeply, good or bad, and wade through an emotion to the other shore,

I believe books are medicine. A library is a medicine cabinet.

glass charred into obsidian.

Is home the place where you feel safe? What about those whose home isn’t safe? Are they homeless, or is home an ideal just out of reach, like heaven? Is home something you move toward instead of going back? Homesickness, then, would be a malaise not for a place left behind in memory, but one remembered in the future.

I bought my house with my pen. All by myself.

the night was my own private house.

the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

Does home mean being unafraid?

“As a woman I have no country, as a woman, my country is the whole world.”