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My memory knows more about me than I do. It doesn’t lose what deserves to be saved. —EDUARDO GALEANO
So often you have to run away from home and visit other homes first before you can clearly see your own.
We find ourselves at home, or homing, in books that allow us to become more ourselves. Home “is not just the place where you were born,” as the travel writer Pico Iyer once noted. “It’s the place where you become yourself.”
Sometimes we need permission, encouragement, someone to fill our heart with desire, because without desire you can’t invent anything.
I don’t know anything, but I know this: whatever is done with love, in the name of others, without self-gain, whatever is done with the heart on behalf of someone or something, be it a child, animal, vegetable, rock, person, cloud, whatever work we make with complete humility, will always come out beautifully, and something more valuable than fame or money will come. This I know.
How do you get any sleep at night if you witness stories that don’t let you go?
It was a book by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace
As lazily and luxuriously as if we were in control of our own destinies.
there were a hell of a lot of doors I had to wedge open, not to mention kick down.
have a theory—one’s most charming trait is also one’s fatal flaw; the one thing you like about somebody is usually their worst defect as well.
convinced if we’re to be artists of any worth we must lock ourselves in a room and work. There are no two ways around this one, no shortcut, no magic word to save the day. Take it as a given, you’ll cry, despair, think you’ll die, that you can’t possibly do it, that it’s a lonely task, you’ll lose faith in yourself, especially at night. But when you finish crying and despairing, you can wipe your eyes and…the work is still there waiting. So you better roll up your sleeves and get moving, girl! Nobody’s going to do the work for you. If you’re serving others other than your art, then it just
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And frankly I don’t want to hear about your kids. We make choices. I’m not going to blame you because I’m childless; true, there is no one to get in my way, but there is also no one there to hug me when I need to be hugged.
“let me teach you something. All colors go well together.”
Poverty is the mother of invention.
I don’t want to quedar bien, that terrible syndrome of las mujeres.
What is the Mexican American aesthetic? I think and then respond: “More is more.”
You arrived sent by “Saint Coincidence,” as the poet Joy Harjo calls
I ask, “How come nobody told me?” almost on a daily basis.
“Beware, I am not as I was before. Handle me with care.”
wish somebody had told me then that death allows you the chance to experience the world soulfully, that the heart is open like the aperture of a camera, taking in everything, painful as well as joyous, sensitive as the skin of water.
It’s essential to create when the spirit is dying. It doesn’t matter what. Sometimes it helps to draw. Sometimes to plant a garden. Sometimes to make a Valentine’s Day card. Or to sing, or assemble an altar. Creating nourishes the spirit.
There is no getting over death, only learning how to travel alongside it. It knows no linear time. Sometimes the pain is as fresh as if it just happened. Sometimes it’s a space I tap with my tongue daily like a missing molar.
Say what they say, some may doubt the existence of God, but everyone is certain of the existence of love.
you must do what your heart guides you.
can’t imagine it any other way, because Teresita lived and spoke always by way of her heart.
Hummingbird’s Daughter and Queen of America, both by Luis Alberto Urrea
When I make people laugh in English, it’s wonderful. When I make them laugh with something I’ve said in Spanish, it’s pure glory. I walk with a higher step. I’m at peace with myself. I go to bed feeling I’ve improved the world. Maybe not by much, but just enough.
But people who have no life of their own like to meddle in the lives of those who do.
