Julia Alvarez Quotes

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

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

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.

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Independence didn't have to be exile.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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?

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

Depression is always in the details.