Julia Alvarez quotes:

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

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.

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.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

Depression is always in the details.

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

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

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

I write to find out what I am thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

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.

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

Independence didn't have to be exile.

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

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