Sonia Sotomayor Quotes

I scheduled the lessons, rolled up the carpet and committed myself to learning salsa. No longer would I sit there like a potted plant watching others on the floor. The gawky uncoordinated Sonia would make peace with herself in motion.

Achievement was all very well, but it was the process, not the goal, that was most important.

Few aspects of my work in the DA’s Office were more rewarding than to see what I had learned in childhood among the Latinos of the Bronx prove to be as relevant to my success as Ivy League schooling was. It was in effect to see that mastery of the law’s cold abstractions, which had taken such effort, was actually incomplete without an understanding of how they affected individual lives.

a surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence.

I’d always believed people can change; very few are carved in stone or beyond redemption. All my life I’ve looked around me and asked: What can I learn here? What qualities in this friend, this mentor, even this rival, are worth emulating? What in me needs to change?

memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion.

Achievement was all very well, but it was the process, not the goal, that was most important. ON

eyes. A tenderness I have no name for rushes like a drug through my veins, as I realize that the absence of human touch has been, for so long, a burden carried unwittingly.

I’ve lived most of my life inescapably aware that it is precious and finite.

Dawn was a born public defender, her support of the underdog grounded in a native distrust of authority. I was by nature more the prosecutor, a creature of rules. If the system is broken, my inclination is to fix it rather than to fight it.

The nearer one was, in fact, to the realities that had inspired those laws, the more persuasively one could argue for the justice of upholding them.

Ultimately, though, I realized I did have sources of deep happiness, and these bred in me an optimism that proved stronger than any adversity.

The differences were plain enough, and yet I saw that they were as nothing compared with what we had in common. As I lay in bed at night, the sky outside my window reflecting the city's dim glow, I thought about Abuelita’s fierce loyalty to blood. But what really binds people as family? The way they shore themselves up with stories; the way siblings can feud bitterly but still come through for each other; how an untimely death, a child gone before a parent, shakes the very foundations; how the weaker ones, the ones with invisible wounds, are sheltered; how a constant din is medicine against loneliness; and how celebrating the same occasions year after year steels us to the changes they herald. And always food at the center of it all.

No, the problem was not money.

Until we get equality in education, we won't have an equal society.