Richard Rodríguez > Quotes

“The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.”
― Richard Rodriguez

“Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America

“But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

“Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father

“Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women "baby" (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television—I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time—fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude.”
― Richard Rodriguez

“I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously unknown. Or long forgotten. ”
― Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America

“To many persons around him, he appears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.”
― Richard Rodriguez

“Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“My parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

“The parking lot is hidden by thickets of scrub and at a field's distance from the mission compound. Yes, you can imagine the solitude of the landscape; you can imagine the hardness of the life. Perhaps I was expecting too much. La Purísima reminds me of nothing so much as those churches the Soviet government used to ridicule by making of them shrines to history. La Purísima is Williamsburg and Sutter's Fort and worse. The state's [California's] insistence that here are matters only of fact is depressing, the triumph of history over memory.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father

“The impersonality of the written word made it the easiest means of exchange...”
― Richard Rodriguez

“By the waters of baptism, the active European was entirely absorbed within the contemplation of the Indian. The faith that Europe imposed in the sixteenth century was, by virtue of the Guadalupe, embraced by the Indian. Catholicism has become an Indian religion. By the twenty-first century, the locus of the Catholic Church, by virtue of numbers, will be Latin America, by which time Catholicism itself will have assumed the aspect of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Brown skin.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father

“The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one’s family language.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“The conversation advanced with remarkable ease. Talk is cheerful, the way talk is among people who rarely see one another and are surprised they have much to say.”
― Richard Rodriguez

“The power the old exert over the young is the power to send the young to war -- flesh in its perfection dropped into a hellish maze of stimulus and response in order to defend an old man's phrase. A phrase! What? The American way of life? Yes. It galls me to say it, but yes. This paragraph costs me nothing. And yet I know it cost the life of a boy or a girl with a ready body and a mind not ripe. N one will come to question me this evening.”
― Richard Rodríguez, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography

“I work to support my habit of writing.”
― Richard Rodríguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

“We saw people -- they were so far away but we knew they were people, they were not cinders or the leaves of calendars; we saw people who had no alternatives but to consign their bodies -- their bodies, I say, but I mean their lives -- to the air, people who are loved, I believe, by God, even as I believe their murderers are loved by God. Falling.”
― Richard Rodríguez

“start working- rarely resting- seemingly driven by a fatalistic sense that work that has to be done was best done as quickly as possible.”
― Richard Rodriguez