“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d've done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

“One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.”

“It was one thing to accept I couldn't have Dimitri. It was something entirely different to realize someone else could.”

“Being a Chicana is a political, societal, economic and spiritual stance for me because I identify myself with the struggle of Chicanos in this marginal border world of identity—straddling different worlds, the world of the raices in Mexico, the roots, and also the contemporary world of the United States…”

“When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for having been there.”

“There's all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.”

“But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think.”

“I was not ladylike, nor was I manly. I was something else altogether. There were so many different ways to be beautiful.”

“Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.”

“When I was growing up, the pain was so sharp, it was like I’d been cut by a knife. As I get older, the pain is different, it is deep in there and stays there.”