Time & Perspective Quote by Sandra Cisneros

Cisneros frames the novel not as a product but as a moral technology: a way to slow life down until it becomes legible. The “nice thing” isn’t comfort or prestige; it’s time as an artistic resource, the rare permission to refuse the instant verdict. When she says you can “sit with the character sometimes nine years,” she’s defending duration as a countercultural stance in a world that rewards hot takes, clean arcs, and quick closure. The novel becomes a long apprenticeship in attention.

The subtext is a critique of how we move through actual relationships: we “snap something out” because speed protects us. Quick judgments keep us from the discomfort of contradiction, from holding competing truths about people we love, fear, or envy. Writing, for Cisneros, is a rehearsal space for empathy, but not the Hallmark kind; it’s empathy that tolerates mess, that keeps returning to the same scene until it yields its buried motives and quiet injuries.

Context matters here: Cisneros’s work is deeply invested in interiority and the politics of being seen, especially for voices flattened by stereotype or silence. Taking nine years with a character is also a refusal of the market’s demand for immediacy, a claim that certain lives and stories can’t be responsibly rendered on deadline. The line lands because it makes craft sound like ethics: to write a novel well is to practice the patience real life rarely affords, then smuggle that patience back into how we judge one another.