Every single house has had death visit.

I've put up with too much, too long, and now I'm just too intelligent, too powerful, too beautiful, too sure of who I am finally to deserve anything less.

I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her skin.

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

You can't erase what you know. You can't forget who you are.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

'Hispanic' is English for a person of Latino origin who wants to be accepted by the white status quo. 'Latino' is the word we have always used for ourselves.

If you know two cultures and two languages, that intermediate place, where the two don't perfectly meet, is really interesting.

People know when you're speaking from el corazón. You have that pain. Take that pain and do something with it. That's very powerful.

The world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

You don't want somebody who doesn't know his own heart, do you? You'll find someone who's brave enough to love you. Someday. One day. Not today.

To overcome the fear of failure, do what makes you fearful.

Do I not well deserve to be turned into hell, if the scorns and threats of blinded men, if the fear of silly, rotten earth, can drive me thither (588)?

Laugh soon because you never know how soon it will be too late

Slowly but surely, the older I get, the fatter I get. It just goes.

Thinking is always the stumbling stone to poetry.

I don't eat breakfast. I know it's the most important meal of the day but my body doesn't respond to it well.

When I play, I open up. I'm in the heat of the performance and it's a healing thing. It's great!

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.

The obligation of a society as prosperous as ours is to figure out how nobody gets left too far behind.