Gloria E. Anzaldúa Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it. Con el destierro y el exilo fuimos desuñados, destroncados, destripados - we were jerked out by the roots, truncated, disemboweled, dispossessed, and separated from our identity and our history.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Nothing happens in the 'real' world unless it first happens in the images in our heads

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
To survive the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. Or perhaps we will decide to disengage from the dominant culture, write it off all together as a lost cause, and cross the border into a wholly new and separate territory. Or we might go another route. The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
My 'awakened dreams' are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fly through the air, heal from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self, and el espirítu del mundo. I change myself, I change the world.
'El espirítu del mundo' means 'The spirit of the world'

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Though we tremble before uncertain futures may we meet illness, death and adversity with strength may we dance in the face of our fears.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
These my two hands
quick to slap my face
before others could slap it.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incomparable frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
In trying to become 'objective,' Western culture made 'objects' of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing 'touch' with them.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
To separate from my culture (as from my family) I had to feel competent enough on the outside and secure enough inside to live life on my own. Yet in leaving home I did not lose touch with my origins because lo mexicano is in my system. I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry 'home' on my back.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an 'alien' element.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Nobody's going to save you. No one's going to cut you down, cut the thorns thick around you. No one's going to storm the castle walls nor kiss awake your birth, climb down your hair, nor mount you onto the white steed. There is no one who will feed the yearning. Face it. You will have to do, do it yourself.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I am visible — see this Indian face — yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't, we haven't.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Deviance is whatever is condemned by the community. Most societies try to get rid of their deviants. Most cultures have burned and beaten their homosexuals and others who deviate from the sexual common. The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe's fear: being different, being other and therefore lesser, therefore sub-human, in-human, non-human.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
The U.S.-Mexican border es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture.
'un herida abierta' means 'an open wound'

Gloria E. Anzaldúa
I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa