“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.”

“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.”

“Whatever's wrong, you know if it's worth fixing or not. If it is, then fix it. If not, leave it alone and move on. If I raised you to be strong, then that means I didn't teach you to sit around and wait on life and happiness to happen to you. You go after it, Macy.And if something is standing in your way, you go through it.”

“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.”

“When he began to move, it wasn’t with the urgency she expected given their rushed beginnings. It was with a slow deliberation that would destroy her.”

“I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.”