Julia Alvarez Quotes

Don't plan it all. Let life surprise you a little.

Everyone needs a strong sense of self. It is our base of operations for everything that we do in life.

I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn.

I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn't talk about difficult situations - there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to.

The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote.

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like.

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle.

How we lie to ourselves when we've fallen in love with the wrong man.

The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on.

Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.

Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves.

It doesn't make any sense. If the SIM are policemen, secret or not, shouldn't we trust them instead of being afraid of them?

Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness.

There is no end to what can be said about the world

It's like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I'm stitching the scraps back together.

Depression is always in the details.

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations.

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn't begin when you sit down to write. It's a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention.

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, "I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me." That could be the motto of literature!

For me, the writing life doesn't just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. 'My heart keeps open house,' was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, 'I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure.

A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature.

It's always gratifying to hear from a passionate reader, and as a longtime educator, I'm especially pleased and heartened when that reader is a young student who is inspired to write me and let me know that my book has helped him or her find her way.

Marjorie Agosin proves the power of the word to transport us to the center of her humane and human vision.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family.