“You never have to get over it you just have to get on with it.”

“I am poor, but I am rich. I have my children, I have a garden with roses, and I have my faith and the memories of those who have gone before me. What more is there?”

“Our Land is alive, Esperanza...This whole valley breathes and lives...He picked up a handful of earth and studied it. Did you know that when you lie down on the land, you can feel it breathe? That you can feel its heart beating.”

“This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.”

“The needle rocked awkwardly and at the end of her beginning rows, Isabel held up her work to show Esperanza. "Mine is all crooked!"Esperanza smiled and reached over and gently pulled the yarn, unraveling the uneven stitches. Then she looked into Isabel's trusting eyes and said, "Do not ever be afraid to start over.”

“Pablo Neruda's poems tramped through the mud [with the fieldworker]...knocked at the doors of mansions...sat at the table of the baker...The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers...The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand. The books traveled over fences. and bridges. and across borders. soaring from continent to continent. until he had passed thousands of gifts through a hole in the fence to a multitude of people in every corner of the world.”

“... and her name was Freedom.”