Richard Rodriguez famous quotes

03-24-2025

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

#Book #Beer #Sea
So many of my friends tell me theyâ€™re not religious. Iâ€™m like, Of course youâ€™re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, donâ€™t you?
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Religious #Watches
But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Trying #Doe #Remember
You learn in America to speak two ways. You learn in public discourse not to be very specific about your religious life. Or, if we talk about it, we'll find a secular way of doing it that will not be offensive to people of non-belief. So, that you go through life with these alternate voices.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Religious #Two #Voice
The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Morning #Book #Yellow
My parents had come from Mexico, a short road in my imagination. I felt myself as coming from a caramelized planet, an upside-down planet, pineapple-cratered. Though I was born here, I came from the other side of the looking glass, as did Alice, though not alone like Alice. Downtown I saw lots of brown people. Old men on benches. Winks from Filipinos. Sikhs who worked in the fields were the most mysterious brown men, their heads wrapped in turbans. They were the rose men. They looked like roses.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Men #Glasses #Imagination
Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man's pessimism is nessessarily truer than a young man's optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man's power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Life #Spring #Believe
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

#Moving #Dark #Doors
I regret that I was never an athlete. I regret there isn't time in life. I regret that so many of my friends have died. I regret that I was not brave at certain times in my life. I regret that I'm not beautiful. I regret that my conversation is largely with myself. I'm not part of the conversation of the world.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Beautiful #Regret #Athlete
But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Country #Home #America
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. You take the rest â€” my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Team #Kids #White
In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Black And White #Mexican #East
I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Writing #America #Race
A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Becoming #Students #Forget
There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Stranger
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

#Children #Spring #Thinking
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

#Drama #Way #Energy
The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Honesty #Integrity #Mean
Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.
-- Richard Rodriguez

#Father #Justice #Mexico

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