I am a New Yorker, and 7:00 A.M. is a civilized hour to finish the day, not to start it.
I'm young at heart. I'm young in spirit, and I'm still adventurous.
When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.
So many people grew up with challenges, as I did. There weren't always happy things happening to me or around me. But when you look at the core of goodness within yourself - at the optimism and hope - you realize it comes from the environment you grew up in.
Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see.
I strive never to forget the real world consequences of my decisions on individuals, businesses and government.
I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
Although I grew up in very modest and challenging circumstances, I consider my life to be immeasurably rich.
An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.
I savor life. When you have anything that threatens life... it prods you into stepping back and really appreciating the value of life and taking from it what you can.
If I write a book where all I've ever experienced is success, people won't take a positive lesson from it. In being candid, I have to own up to my own failures, both in my marriage and in my work environment.
The task of a judge is not to make the law - it is to apply the law.
I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am Puerto Rican, born and raised in the south Bronx. My test scores were not comparable to my colleagues at Princeton and Yale. Not so far off so that I wasn't able to succeed at those institutions.
With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that's been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that.
I don't believe we should bend the Constitution under any circumstance. It says what it says. We should do honor to it.
This wealth of experiences, personal and professional, have helped me appreciate the variety of perspectives that present themselves in every case that I hear.
Diabetes taught me discipline.
I was raised in a Bronx public housing project, but studied at two of the nation's finest universities. I did work as an assistant district attorney, prosecuting violent crimes that devastate our communities.
To have a romance, you have to have time. I'm a justice. I've written a book. The guy's gonna have to wait until I'm a little bit freer.
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.
