39 Quotes by 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.

The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy.

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

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...

Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution.

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.

By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.

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.

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.