Kathleen Alcalá Quotes

born 1954 United States

Kathleen Alcalá (born 29 August 1954) is the author of a short story collection, three novels set in the American Southwest and nineteenth-century Mexico, and a collection of essays.

United States
Authors
Educators
Essayists
Novelists

Random Kathleen Alcalá quote

24 quotes

She could drop her shyness the way she dropped it to recite a speech or a poem, then step back into it like a cloak.

When children went every day to school to learn to live in a world that no longer existed.

After all, what is the passing of time but a diamond turned to dust?

This is how they took back the world - step by step, song by song.

In a way, artists are messengers between worlds, bringing ideas and symbols from one to the other.

The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

as time succeeded time into a whirlpool of eternity.

This was new, the consciousness that she might have a future beyond herself.

Tater was proud of her unusual name, and secretly hoped she was like them, ordinary at first look, but gem-like on the inside. Rooted.

There is a love of place that transcends the love of individuals.

In a novel or a movie, it’s often silence that communicates what cannot be said through words.

Fiction Writers Review (2021)

We remake our world by reimagining it, by sharing our idea of the world.

Fiction Writers Review (2021)

For many people their story begins the moment their families arrive here. That’s only one way of telling their story.

Fiction Writers Review (2021)

We each seek to retrace those steps that led us from where we once were, to where we are now. ("Found in Translation")

The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

That's how dreams are. Nothing ever quite happens, but you assume it's going to. It's as though your mind stops wasting energy on the image once it thinks you understand what's going on. (p163)

The Flower in the Skull (1998)

I want my writing to insinuate itself into the subconscious of the people of the Southwest, so that we might remember who we were and who we will be, since so little time is spent in the present.

The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

Anyone can imagine a story. Writers imagine and get the story down on the page.

Fiction Writers Review (2021)

There was so much, he thought, of which she never spoke. (p172)

Treasures in Heaven (2000)

We are not going to eradicate poverty by bombing people. ("Dear John: A Letter to a Friend Following 9/11")

The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing (2007)

Every story that is written or told has the capacity to heal. (undated)

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kathleen Alcalá (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.