An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.

Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads

Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.

Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution.

The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.