48+ Best Julia Alvarez Quotes: Exclusive Selection

Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Yo!. Many of her works examine the conflicts and benefits that go along with living as both a Dominican and an American. Inspirational Julia Alvarez quotes will make you look at life differently and help you live a meaningful life.

If you’re searching for best quotes from famous authors that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of inspirational writing quotes and powerful poetry quotes.

Most Famous Julia Alvarez Quotes

Each of us will have to make the choices that allow us to be the largest versions of ourselves. – Julia Alvarez

The point is not to pay back kindness but to pass it on. – Julia Alvarez

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart. – Julia Alvarez

It’s like my whole world is coming undone, but when I write, my pencil is a needle and thread, and I’m stitching the scraps back together. – Julia Alvarez

I write to find out what I am thinking. I write to find out who I am. I write to understand things. – Julia Alvarez

I admit that for me love goes deeper than the struggle, or maybe what I mean is, love is the deeper struggle. – Julia Alvarez

A book does not discriminate against any reader. All are welcome at the table of literature. – Julia Alvarez

I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. – Julia Alvarez

I’m not doing anything, and yet I’m also doing the most important thing a man can do: I’m listening to what I needed to hear from myself. – Julia Alvarez

Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone’s savior. – Julia Alvarez

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful. – Julia Alvarez

The only thing scarier than telling someone you love them is telling them that you still love them. – Julia Alvarez

What you radiate outward in your thoughts, feelings, mental pictures and words, you attract into your life. – Julia Alvarez

It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self-love deficit. – Julia Alvarez

Neither of us is happy but neither of us wants to leave so we keep breaking one another and calling it love. – Julia Alvarez

Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. – Julia Alvarez

Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? – Julia Alvarez

I swear I couldn’t love you more than I do right now, and yet I know I will tomorrow. – Julia Alvarez

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. – Julia Alvarez

You fall in love with the little things about someone, like the sound of their laughter and the way their smile forms. – Julia Alvarez

Are there any rules when it comes to love. There is just one: Let it change you. Let it leave you better than you were before. – Julia Alvarez

I stopped looking for someone to love me. I became that person instead. – Julia Alvarez

I love you. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight. – Julia Alvarez

I feel a rush of gratitude so strong; it feels almost like love. – Julia Alvarez

Even if you know how something’s going to end, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the ride. – Julia Alvarez

The more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it becomes. – Julia Alvarez

A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you. – Julia Alvarez

The demand to be loved is the greatest kind of arrogance. – Julia Alvarez

He felt only what he had always felt in her presence—love and aching awe and gratitude for her. – Julia Alvarez

Inspirational Julia Alvarez Quotes

The scary part is I knew exactly how bad you were for me and yet that didn’t stop me from loving you – Julia Alvarez

Don’t plan it all. Let life surprise you a little. – Julia Alvarez

Everyone needs a strong sense of self. It is our base of operations for everything that we do in life. – Julia Alvarez

As a young writer, I was on guard against the Latina in me, the Spanish in me because as far as I could see the models that were presented to me did not include my world. In fact, ‘I was told by one teacher in college that one could only write poetry in the language in which one first said Mother. That left me out of American literature, for sure. – Julia Alvarez

For me, the writing life doesn’t just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. ‘My heart keeps open house,’ was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world. – Julia Alvarez

I grew up in a dictatorship, where you couldn’t talk about difficult situations – there was this culture of silence. We would run into a problem and have no one to talk to. – Julia Alvarez

Every writer can tell you that a book is only truly alive when it finds passionate readers who bring it alive in their imaginations. – Julia Alvarez

Schools provide safe spaces to talk about controversial issues, and literature presents characters portraying human experience in all its richness and contradictoriness. – Julia Alvarez

But the sensibility of the writer, whether fiction or poetry, comes from paying attention. I tell my students that writing doesn’t begin when you sit down to write. It’s a way of being in the world, and the essence of it is paying attention. – Julia Alvarez

There is no end to what can be said about the world – Julia Alvarez

The elasticity of imagination and compassion is what writing and reading promote. – Julia Alvarez

How we lie to ourselves when we’ve fallen in love with the wrong man. – Julia Alvarez

When we read, even if the characters are tragic or sad or disturbing, these are our brothers and sisters in the human family. – Julia Alvarez

Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way, I should think, to begin to address the richness that is in each of us. – Julia Alvarez

Independence didn’t have to be exile. – Julia Alvarez

Reading is a way to take in the difficult situations and understand them. The whole point of reading a book in class is to have discussion about what these situations are like. – Julia Alvarez

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being. – Julia Alvarez

It’s always gratifying to hear from a passionate reader, and as a longtime educator, I’m especially pleased and heartened when that reader is a young student who is inspired to write me and let me know that my book has helped him or her find her way. – Julia Alvarez

Terrence, the Roman slave who freed himself with his writings, once observed, “I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me.” That could be the motto of literature! – Julia Alvarez

I think it is important to know how to teach new material to help young people grow and learn. – Julia Alvarez