A biography for Sonia Sotomayorhasn’t been written yet.
“When I'm concentrating, I can be fixed in place for hours. In fact, there was a joke in my office that everybody would come and chat outside my door because they knew - no matter how loud they talked - if I was concentrating, it would not disturb me at all.”
“I'm young at heart. I'm young in spirit, and I'm still adventurous.”
“The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.”
“I firmly believe in the rule of law as the foundation for all of our basic rights.”
“Diabetes taught me discipline.”
“I have never had to face anything that could overwhelm the native optimism and stubborn perseverance I was blessed with.”
“I found in my experiences that it's not that men are consciously discriminating against promoting women, but I do believe as people we have self-images about what's good.”
“... a surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence. Page 115”
“I think that the day a justice forgets that each decision comes at a cost to someone, then I think you start losing your humanity.”
“I do think there is a value in the services of judges for long periods of time.”
“My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”
“I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I'd have to develop for myself.”
“I've never wanted to get adjusted to my income, because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it's not modest at all. I have no right to complain.”
“[T]he more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.”
“I stand on the shoulders of countless people, yet there is one extraordinary person who is my life aspiration. That person is my mother, Celina Sotomayor.”
“I think it's important to move people beyond just dreaming into doing. They have to be able to see that you are just like them, and you made it.”
“Dressing badly has been a refuge much of my life, a way of compelling others to engage with my mind, not my physical presence. Page. 283”
“All of the legal defense funds out there, they're looking for people out there with court of appeals experience, because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don't make law, I know. I know.”
“I am a very spiritual person. Maybe not traditionally religious in terms of Sunday Mass every week, that sort of thing.”
“It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.”