I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes.

I think of reading as like a medicine cabinet.

I think that you need to have books that talk about the lives of the poor, and they need to be involved - involved in acquisitions.

I live in a town that's two and a half hours from the border. I know people who have lived in San Antonio for generations, sometimes seven generations, their families are from there, and they are of Mexican descent, and they've never gone farther than the border.

Every book takes you to the terror, that terrible place of possible failure.

We tend to think of orphans as being the protagonist of stories we read when we're kids, and yet here you are: you're an adult, you're supposed to manage, you're supposed to get over it, you're supposed to go on with your life, and you feel like a lost child.

I usually say Latina, Mexican-American or American Mexican, and in certain contexts, Chicana, depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.