Sandra Cisneros

Quotes from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros:

'In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.'

(of grandmother) 'And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow ... I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.'

'... a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.'

(Friend Cathy, French descendent, moving away) 'In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in.'

(comical, of fat lady) 'Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too.'

'Meme has a dog with grey eyes, a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in Spanish.'

'What matters, Marin says, is for the boys to see us and for us to see them ... And Marin just looks at them without even blinking and is not afraid.'

'All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight.'

'The Eskimos got thirty different names for snow, I say. I read it in a book.'

'And then she [Sister Superior] made me stand up on a box of books and point. That one? she said pointing to a row of ugly three-flats, the ones even the raggedy men are ashamed to go into. Yes, I nodded even though I knew that wasn't my house and started to cry.'

(of Esperanza's aunt) 'You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn't know what she meant.'

'And then she died, my aunt who listened to my poems. / And then we began to dream the dreams.'

(after reading to Ruthie, who cannot read, needs to visit eye doctor, used to write children's books) 'She took a long time looking at me before she opened her mouth, and then she said, You have the most beautiful teeth I have ever seen, and went inside.'

(of Lois, girlfriend of Sire) '... she smells pink like babies do.'

'Sire. How did you hold her? Was it? Like this? And when you kissed her? Like this?'

'They are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them. Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine. Four who do not belong here but are here ... Their strength is secret. They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep.'

(of Mamacita, 'big mama of the man across the street') '... a flutter of hips, fuchsia roses and green perfume.'

'Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would.'

'Cuando, cuando, cuando? she asks. / Ay, Caray! We are home. This is home. HEre I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ!'

'And then to break her heart forever, the baby boy who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heart on T.V. / No speak English, she says to the child who is singing in the language that sounds like tin. No speak English, no speak English, and bubbles into tears. No, no, no as if she can't believe her ears.'

(of Rafaela, locked indoors by husband because she is 'too' beautiful, leans out the window plenty) 'Rafaela who drinks and drinks coconut and papaya juice on Tuesdays and wishes there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island, like the dance hall down the street where women much older than her throw green eyes easily like dice and open homes with keys. [autonomy?] And always there is someone offering sweeter drinks, someone promising to keep them on a silver string.'

'Sally is the girl with eyes like Egypt ... Sally, who taught you to paint your eyes like Cleopatra?'

'Cheryl, who is not your friend anymore ... not since she called you that name and bit a hole in your arm ...'

'Sally, do you sometimes wish you didn't have to go home? Do you wish your feet would one day keep walking and take you far away from Mango Street, far away and maybe your feet would stop in front of a house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs ... all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.'

(of Minerva, who is only a little older but with a husband and two kids) 'Next week she comes over black and blue and asks what can she do? Minerva. I don't know which way she'll go. There is nothing I can do.'

'I don't tell them I am ashamed - all of us staring out the window like the hungry. I am tired of looking at what we can't have. When we win the lottery ... Mama begins, and then I stop listening.'

'People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth ... / One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. / Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumble. / Rats? they'll ask. / Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy.'

'Nenny says she won't wait her whole life for a husband to come and get her ... She wants things all her own, to pick and choose. Nenny has pretty eyes and it's easy to talk that way if you are pretty.'

'I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain. / In the movies there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away. / I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.'

Esperanza's mother: 'Shame is a bad thing, you know. It keeps you down. You want to know why I quit school? Because I didn't have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains.'

'Until one day Sally's father catches her talking to a boy and the next day she doesn't come to school. And the next. Until the way Sally tells it, he just went crazy, he just forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt. / You're not my daughter, you're not my daughter. And then he broke into his hands.'

'Somebody started the lie that the monkey garden had been there before anything. We liked to think the garden could hide things for a thousand years. There beneath the roots of soggy flowers were the bones of murdered pirates and dinosaurs, the eye of a unicorn turned to coal. / This is where I wanted to die and where I tried one day but not even the monkey garden would have me. It was the last day I would go there.'

'... something in me wanted to throw a stick. Something wanted to say no when I watched Sally going into the garden with Tito's buddies all grinning. It was just a kiss, that's all. A kiss for each one. So what, she said.'

'Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again. The moon that watched. The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongue laugh ... He wouldn't let me go. He said I love you, I love you, Spanish girl.'

'She [Sally, after young marriage] looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as a wedding cake.'

(of three sisters/aunts, las comadres) 'When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street ... / ... for the ones who cannot leave as easily as you.'

'And the thought of the mayor coming to Mango Street makes me laugh out loud. Who's going to do it [make Mango Street 'better']? Not the mayor.'

'I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head ... / I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, "And so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked." / I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn't want to belong.'

'... what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to.'

'I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.'

'One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away. / Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away? / They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.'

Piano Crave

I'm sure I've posted about this before, but there it is. I'm watching someone play 'That's Why You Go Away' by MLTR on the piano and I'm just like - I WANT.

I suppose I'll try to go brush up some guitar skills and make do with pathetic guitar strumming (only pathetic because it's me, bahaha).

All righty.

Nicole Krauss

Quotes from Great House by Nicole Krauss:

'What I thought was a simpler, purer prose, more searing for being stripped of all distracting ornament, was actually a dull and lumbering mass, void of tension or energy, standing in opposition to nothing, toppling nothing, shouting nothing.'

'In her work the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.'

'I began to suspect that instead of exposing the hidden depths of things, as all along I'd supposed I was doing, perhaps the opposite was true, that I'd been hiding behind the things I wrote, using them to obscure a secret lack ...'

'... a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words.'

'... to learn from the painful lessons of self-scrutiny, and correct a little, to find the way out of the maddening circular game where we are forever eating our own tails.'

'And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thought - One has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon.'

'Such is life, my boy: if you think you're original in anything, think again.'

'What is it like, I once demanded of you, to be a man of such high principles that no one else can live up to them? But you only turned your back on me, just as you turned your back on everyone who betrayed you with their shortcomings.'

'... Lotte was content to live in a perennial state of misunderstanding. It's so rare, when you think about it, a trait one can imagine belonging to the psychology of a race more advanced than ours.'

'If I wanted her, I stood at the bottom of the steps and called up.'

'... the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind - the relief and the horror.'

'I thought of stopping to ask her what was wrong, maybe even taking her out for a drink ... but in the end it was too out of character for the person I have been all my life, whether I've liked it or not, and I kept walking.'

'Suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the center, the always-moving center of the woman I loved.'

'Then came a period when she became scared, aware of how much she was losing by the day, perhaps even the hour, like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion.'

'... what they did, they did without compromise, free of the complications imposed on the rest of us by indecision, wavering, regret.'

'... but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has been given to us to feel.'

'... written in handwriting that will die with his generation (shaky, mangled by its forced leaps from language to language, dignified in its illegibility) ...'

'... and our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.'

Ah, the Paralyses of Art!

I am aware that it is not a competition. It is not a race to see who is better. The worst thing anyone could do – worst because it is shallow and most definitely silly – would be to disregard something because it is good.

Nicole Krauss, I have found, is a genius. Philip Roth, yes, is another genius. And before them, J K Rowling. And Jodi Picoult, at the right times. Natsuo Kirino too, for Grotesque. 

So how do you compete with all that? I ask myself. How do you put yourself in the game when, after reading some extraordinarily profound, poignant and flawless piece of craft, you come away feeling like there is too much you don’t know to even begin writing? And what right, really, do you have to write when there are writers the likes of them?

The answer is, really, not an answer at all. Perhaps it is more a turning away, but I prefer to think of it as an awed sort of acquiescence – the answer is that you don’t compete with them at all.

Instead, the only thing you can do is to learn from them, pick out how they’ve honed their voices into finely tuned instruments, individual as the shape of one’s shoes or cushioned chair, fashioning a brand that rises out of the page to yell ‘This is Nicole Krauss!’ You read and re-read their work, jot down quotes that – at the moment of reading – have you nodding along in breathlessness.

What right do you have, you ask then, to write? Well, that’s easy. There is no right, ever, that has to be earned in the name of art. 

The Essential Human Flaw

Quotes from rom The Human Stain by Philip Roth:

'... that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography - a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.'

'... thereby ensuring that I would do anything I could think of not to bore you, including dropping out of contact, if necessary, so as to avoid the risk of becoming boring.'

'Surprises. Thirty-four years of savage surprises have given her wisdom. But it's a very narrow, antisocial wisdom. It's savage, too. It's the wisdom of somebody who expects nothing. That's her wisdom, and that's her dignity, but it's negative wisdom ...'

'... that scrappy, I've-seen-it-all laugh - you know, the coarse, easy laugh of the woman with a past ...'

'I couldn't meet the costs of its clamoring anymore, could no longer marshal the wit, the strength, the patience, the illusion, the irony, the ardor, the egoism, the resilience - or the toughness, or the shrewdness, or the falseness, the dissembling, the dual being, the erotic professionalism - to deal with its array of misleading and contradictory meanings.'

'... and you feel yourself drawn by the force of the courtship and so act as you don't normally do and a lot more openly than you may even want to.'

'The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially one's own intensity, is to organize the silence ...'

'Lisa was always morally in over her head, but without either the callousness to disappoint the need of another or the strength to disillusion herself about her strength.'

'Learn, he told himself, before you die, to live beyond the jurisdiction of their enraging, loathsome, stupid blame.'

'"Did you kill anyone when you were in Vietnam?" Was there anyone he didn't kill when he was in Vietnam?'

'You're battling now in a world where nobody's ruthlessness bothers to cloak itself in humanitarian rhetoric.'

'Overnight the raw I was part of a we with all of the we's overbearing solidity ...'

'That is, he walked away understanding nothing, knowing he could understand nothing, though with the illusion that he would have metaphysically understood something of enormous importance about this stubborn determination of his to become his own man if ... if only such things were understandable.'

'... because she had the wisdom that is solid, thinking-for-yourself common sense.'

'Why would things happen as they do and history read as it does if inherent to existence was something called normalcy?'

'... all you have to do is give a pretty good and consistent line about yourself and nobody ever inquires, because no one's that interested.'

'This was it, the solution, the secret to his secret, flavored with just a drop of the ridiculous - the redeeming, reassuring ridiculous, life's little contribution to every human decision.'

'Did not see at all what it had to do with me. Everything there was just so concentrated that any sort of pride I ever had was diminished.'

'Yes, she's a contender, this one. Her transcendence into independence, her transformation into a Village girl, the way she handles her folks - she seems to have grown up the way you're supposed to be able to.'

'There was always something about our family, and I don't mean color - there was something about us that impeded you. You think like a prisoner. You do, Coleman Brutus. You're white as snow and you think like a slave.'

'... she seemed to Coleman to step up to the very edge of the big change: the point of turning, as the elderly do, into a tiny, misshapen being.'

'This wonderful language they all have - that they appear to believe - about their 'lack of self-worth,' all the while what they actually believe is that they're entitled to everything.'

'Their shamelessness they call lovingness, and the ruthlessness is camouflaged as lost 'self-esteem'. Hitler lacked self-esteem too.'

'Letting him listen. Sharpening the writer's sense of reality. Feeding that great opportunistic maw, a novelist's mind. Whatever catastrophe turns up, he transforms it into writing. Catastrophe is cannon fodder for him.'

Yeats

Used to love this half of Yeats's poem, can't remember when I read it (A-Levels?). Anyway, here's the first half of The Second Coming -

' Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. '

Chinua Achebe

Here's what he said before - 'Art is, and always was, at the service of man.'