Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Kathleen Alcalá

80 quotes

“For many people their story begins the moment their families arrive here. That’s only one way of telling their story.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s what made me a writer as much as anything. I wanted to hear the endings of stories that didn’t have endings. A family member would tell a story. I would ask, “What happened?” No one would say because no one knew. So I had to write stories.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was growing up these stories were dismissed. They were about a time and place our teachers did not recognize. They brought in other stories and said, “You’re American now, so these are your stories. You must adopt these. You must forget those.” There is no reason, though, for the stories of our grandparents to die just because we speak English now. Stories have emotional as well as practical value.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We remake our world by reimagining it, by sharing our idea of the world.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone can imagine a story. Writers imagine and get the story down on the page.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing every day worked for Hemingway and Dineson. Dineson advised writing a little every day, without hope or expectations. I don’t write every day, but if I intend to write every day I do more than I would otherwise.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grew up on the edge of the Mojave Desert in a very rural part of southern California until I was six years old, when we moved into town. Every time I start writing a new piece, I write a description of that landscape; it’s as if I have to ground myself in those very early memories and relationship to the land before I move on to the next thing.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(What is your advice to Latinex writers?) Don’t devalue your own stories. Two of my role models are Ana Castillo and Denise Chavez, who draw on their backgrounds for the work they do. They are fearless. I look at them and know I have no excuse. For years I wondered who had given Castillo permission to write? I wanted to ask her in person. By the time I met her, I realized she gave herself permission. Apparently, that was what I was waiting for, for someone to say, it’s okay. Well, I gave myself permission, and it’s okay.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe that's the kind of thing you find out when you get older, that these cycles repeat themselves through the generations, how we respond to our relationships with our families, and how they're mirrored in the language we speak and we in turn pass that on to our children.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once you start talking about people as individuals, which I try to do in my fiction, it's impossible to say that any group of people can be excluded from full human rights.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People had big families in those days. And the thing we need to remember about them, in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which is still true in most of Mexico, is that your family is your treasure. You may not have anything else, but people really value children”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what I'm writing about in each of these novels is the notion that these are people who look around at the society they live in or the culture they live in and say, "This isn't necessarily where I belong. I need to change my place in history and I need to change my place in this culture.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a love of place that transcends the love of individuals.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the response shows a generational shift in aesthetic viewpoint, from encouraging the production of literature that shows Mexican-Americans in a socially acceptable light (the society being white), to literature being written to express all that our culture has to offer, and not really caring what others think of us as a result.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since we were in church half the time, I used to sit there and read the Bible, which, like Shakespeare, encompasses most of the human condition.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never made a distinction between realistic and magic realistic writing. The first book I read that probably fell into the accepted canon of magic realism was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by García Márquez, maybe in 1972 or ’73. I remember I found a copy in Spanish later and sent it to my parents, because it was so like our family stories. I also made my husband read it before we married, so that he would understand what sort of a family he was getting into.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Border literature implies the ability to dip into both cultures and step back and forth across the border. This area was a place of cultural convergence long before the Spanish or Americans showed up. By its very nature, the Southwest has always encouraged the cross-pollination of cultures, so border literature appeals to me.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not only are each of us part of the whole, but a single act of kindness is an act of universal grace. A single act of cruelty is a falling away of a bit of the whole for which we are all striving.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that it still takes a very motivated-either by need or exceptional ability-woman to succeed in Mexico today. In a country where the minimum wage is the equivalent of three dollars a day, most working-class women are still too busy putting food on the table to organize. The teachers union is very powerful, and it will probably be through some sort of labor movement, rather than strictly social or cultural, that real change will come about.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope that by including these cultures, the Jewish and indigenous as well as the mestizo, we can get past the idea that we are a monolithic people.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was only in researching this work that history, in general, started to mean anything to me. Economics, the repercussions of the Civil War, the history of Texas, all made sense. Growing up in California, nothing we were taught seemed to have anything to do with us”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a person born not only of translations, but of transitions-my very existence marks that conjunction between one culture and another. By claiming this borderland as my own, by acknowledging that I am neither one nor the other, but both, I have been able to reach out and find the parts of each culture that pertain to me. I will never really understand Mexican politics, or be able to tell a joke in English; but I appreciate the beauty and magic inherent in both languages. I have come to realize, finally, that my life's work, whatever it has been called, is the act of translation. Not necessarily from one language to another, but between world views. I am a translator between worlds, between cultures, between jargons and contexts. And in trying to explain these many worlds to others and to myself, I have become a writer. ("Found in Translation")”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good story works like a musical composition. An idea is presented, elaborated, debated and perhaps defeated, and finally, presented to the reader in a modified, more mature form that embodies the path that was traveled in order to reach that idea. By taking the reader on a journey, we, to a certain extent, can re-create in their experience the thought processes and emotions of our characters. This should be done with compassion, humor, and generosity. But again like music, we can provide a pattern, a symmetry and closure that one seldom encounters in life. That is why reading good writing is pleasurable and fulfilling. That is why listening to good music can induce ecstasy.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...It had become a place of intervention, of restriction, of strife, of a contest of wills between her husband and the natural inclinations of a group of plants and animals to create for themselves a climate of nurture and co-resplendence. For by forbidding the plants to have a free will in order to banish his thoughts of the wilderness, [he] had inadvertently created a desert region that reflected the desolation of his own heart. [His] books grew dusty with neglect, for they could not cure the despondence that hung over him the way the heavy smoke from many cookstoves lingered over the town on a winter morning. (p92)”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“something that interests me is the fact that we continue to document things even if it's after the fact, even if it's a hundred years after the fact, to show that there were other voices, other points of view. I continue to do my work in historical fiction, but whoever we are and wherever we're living, the events around us continue to influence our view of history and we each continue to rewrite history in our own way. There is no set history. Each of us brings a new history to bear...I've done so much research with what's considered history that I've decided that it's just as fictional as fiction is. And many of the truths that I'm interested in telling need to be told in a narrative form, which history or anthropology or some other disciplines doesn't necessarily lend themselves to. People need to hear things in a certain way in order to understand them, and so I think that fiction in many ways tells truths that history is unable to tell.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I got very obsessed with documenting nineteenth-century family life and our relationship to history because I meet so many people who feel we have no foundation in history. We had to reinvent history after the Mexican Revolution. We have sort of cobbled together a history out of what we know and our place in the United States, which included, from all of society that surrounded us and brought us up, this notion that you are not worth anything; you are at the bottom of society. And so I think it's important that we see that we have roots that go deep into the earth here, in the United States and Mexico and in Spain, and all of this is something we can claim as our own heritage. That's certainly how I take it. Rather than being confined to being a mall rat in Southern California, I claim all of this as my heritage. I guess I would like other people to see that as well.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the anthropological terms I've learned that applies to all of these peoples is this notion of syncretism, that cultures and religions come together and forge new cultures and new religions and new languages. And this is really the sign of a living culture and a living history. People are trying to preserve the past and aren't happy with other people if they aren't doing everything the same way that their parents and grandparents [did them], and they'll say, "Oh, that's wrong. You're not doing it right." But the fact that languages change and people change and adapt to new environments is the sign of a living culture to me. I certainly mourn the loss of the heritage that has fallen by the wayside because it was tied directly to landscape. When people moved from the land, they lost that. I also have to admire the spirit of endurance that made people continue to remember.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm really interested in is this notion that when you read histories and when you read official documentations of countries and people, they tend to be very much on the macro level. When I did the research on nineteenth-century Mexico, you can find out where all the railroads ran, you can find out the front lines of all the battles, of all the wars, but you can't find out things like how women actually prepared meals in the home every day. That was much harder to find. The outward history, the official history, is easy to find. But the little things of how families interacted were much more difficult to research and I had to dig a little deeper.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stories of the supernatural are stories of transformation, from one state to another. Love is the strongest transformational force that we know, and also the one most sought after on a daily, ordinary basis. These stories, for the most part, were not tales of alienation, which might have been expected if this was a collection of strictly horror stories, but of people searching for connections, usually to others. When our drive to connect, to transform ourselves from one state to another (unhappy to happy, unloved to loved, shackled to free) is so strong that it seems to exceed the limits of the physical world, then we may invoke the otherworldly on our own behalf. And sometimes there is a response, but not always in the ways that we expect.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we use the term feminism in 19th Century Mexico, it means something entirely different from what Americans think of as feminism from the 1960s or 70s. Feminists in Mexico, at that time, were fighting for state-funded education for women. They were fighting for legitimate employment for women, fair wages and working conditions. Women had actually lost legal status in the mid 1800s under the rewriting of the constitution after independence from Spain, and women did not get the vote in Mexico until the 1950s. I suppose the fight is not too different today, including the search for cheap labor by the United States, and the search for foreign capital by the government of Mexico.”
Kathleen Alcalá (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source