“Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp ...”

“Though we tremble before uncertain futuresmay we meet illness, death and adversity with strengthmay we dance in the face of our fears.”

“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.) ”

“A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.”

“I will have my serpents tongue - my womans voice, my sexual voice, my poets voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.”

“I preferred the world of imagination to the death of sleep”

“Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a...”

“A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movement...”

“We’re afraid the others will think we’re agringadas because we don’t speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be “real” Chicanas, to speak like Chican...”

“No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.”

“I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.”

“I held Angie Luna in that room for hours, and I remember the different times we made love like epochs in a civilization, each movement and every touch, apex upon abyss. In the luxury of our bed, we...”