“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 relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.”

“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 movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.”

“Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.”

“You gonna marry her? This is the one out of seven billion?""It is. And I am. I've got to. It's like...sometimes...""Speak.""Sometimes I think I'm not going to make it another day without getting a ring on that girl's finger and changing her fucking last name from theirs to mine. I'm going to spend the rest of my life with her, and I want it to start yesterday.”

“Let it go. That’s my philosophy: learn to not give a fuck, at least about petty shit. Life will be much simpler.”

“Without a conscious thought to do so, he went down on his knees in front of her, grasping both her hands. If she wouldn’t look up at him, she couldlook down at him. Her tiny, surprised intake of breath caught in the air between them. He lifted her knuckles to his lips, aching so hard to touchsome part of her. “Being away from you has been…hell. I could wax poetic and tell you it’s been like being torn away from my own soul, or missing ashard of my heart, but in the end it’s been absolute torment. I’m missing all those things if I’m not with you.”

“Wait until you see my socratic method, baby.”