Richard Rodriguez Quotes

15 quotes in 312 categories

• Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.
• 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.…
• But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.
• 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…
• 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…
• There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.
• 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 write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?
• 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.…

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