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Richard Rodriguez

119 quotes

“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 (born 1944) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Night and Day" in Frontiers (1990)
“As you see yourself, I once saw myself; as you see me now, you will be seen.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoting a Mexican proverb in "Night and Day" in Frontiers (1990)
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“‘Why?’ My mother’s question hangs in the still air of memory. The loneliness I have felt many mornings, however, has not made me forget that I am engaged in a highly public activity. I sit here in silence writing this small volume of words, and it seems to me the most public thing I ever have done. My mother’s letter has served to remind me: I am making my personal life public. Probably I will never try to explain my motives to my mother and father. My mother’s question will go unanswered to her face.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once upon a time, I was a ‘socially disadvantaged’ child. An enchantedly happy child. Mine was a childhood of intense family closeness. And extreme public alienation.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grew up victim to a disabling confusion. As I grew fluent in English, I no longer could speak Spanish with confidence.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I ask questions about religion that my grandparents didn’t ask, it is not because I am intellectually advanced. I wonder about the existence of God because, unlike my grandparents, I live much of my day in a secular city where I do not measure the hours with the tolling bells of a church.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was the student at Stanford who remembered to notice the Mexican-American janitors and gardeners working on campus.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I became a man by becoming a public man.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is education that has altered my life. Carried me far.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So little is said about the scholarship boy in pages and pages of educational literature. Nothing is said of the silence that comes to separate the boy from his parents.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An Hispanic-American writer tells me, ‘I will never give up my family language; I would as soon give up my soul.’ Thus he holds to his chest a skein of words, as though it were the source of his family ties. He credits to language what he should credit to family members. A convenient mistake. For as long as he holds on to words, he can ignore how much else has changed in his life.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I sought admission to graduate schools, when I applied for fellowships and summer study grants, when I needed a teaching assistantship, my Spanish surname or the dark mark in the space indicating my race—‘check one’—nearly always got me whatever I asked for.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted, however, something more from the new middle-class institution than either the decadent romanticism of the sixties or the careerism of the seventies. I wanted students more aware of their differences from persons less advantaged.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Supporters of bilingual education today imply that students like me miss a great deal by not being taught in their family’s language. What they seem not to recognize is that, as a socially disadvantaged child, I considered Spanish to be a private language. What I needed to learn in school was that I had the right—and the obligation—to speak the public language of los gringos.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The policy of affirmative action, however, was never able to distinguish someone like me (a graduate student of English, ambitious for a college teaching career) from a slightly educated Mexican-American who lived in a barrio and worked as a menial laborer, never expecting a future improved. Worse, affirmative action made me the beneficiary of his conditions.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my name came up in a conversation. Someone at the sherry party had wondered if the professor had seen my latest article on affirmative action. The professor replied with arch politeness, ‘And what does Mr. Rodriguez have to complain about?’ You who read this act of contrition should know that by writing it I seek a kind of forgiveness—not yours. The forgiveness, rather, of those many persons whose absence from higher education permitted me to be classed a minority student. I wish that they would read this. I doubt they ever will.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Chicano student movement at UC Santa Barbara didn't want me there. These are the same people that sit on a multicultural committee. But they don't want me there because for them I represent a cultural perspective that they do not accept. Their version of multiculturalism is that it all be left wing, that it all be formed by a quasi-Marxist voodooism. And if anybody comes into their world that is any different from that, they can't deal with it. Because they are not multiculturalist at all. They're the most sectarian people I know.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I take great pride in my literary works. Journalism is much faster. I'm not embarrassed by my journalism. I consider it to be like sketches, like an artist's sketch. I use it later in other writing. But I don't pretend that it has high literary merit either. I can do an essay pretty fast. I do them on airplanes, I do them at hotels, I do them at bus stops sometimes. I've written very good things on the go.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's the technology. There is this thing between you and the viewer. The viewer is watching this magnifying glass, and technology exaggerates you. You are left with the sense of how small you are, not with the sense of how big you are—if you're smart. If you're dumb you begin to believe that you are the image—that you cannot be replaced. But you can be replaced in a minute. For every Madonna there's another. For every Dan Rather there's another.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But it's a very interesting part of my life. It really is a much more sexual book than I have ever tried before. It's also about Hollywood. What I did in those years was I saw the world. And I literally traveled all over the world because I was kept, and I knew five star hotels. I know where to stay in Geneva, and I know where to stay in Bangkok, and I know that because I sat at swimming pools and read the fashion magazines for hours in Geneva. I know what to do in Buenos Aires, what restaurants to go to, where the pretty people go for lunch.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rodriguez: When my mother read Hunger of Memory, she was horrified by it and she asked me, as an accusation, "Why did you hold these things in all of your years against me, why didn't you tell me? If I offended you by talking about how dark you were in the summer why didn't you tell me that? And tell me to stop? Why do you hold that for another 25 years and then spill it all out?" Good question, Mama. Good question.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Rodriguez:I get letters especially from older readers who are working class, and who know what that is like. That's why I take it that the energies of the book are mainly class and not ethnic.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the other hand I tell my true intimates that what I write is not intended for them. In fact I'd prefer they never read it. When I write, I'm talking to somebody I intend to never meet.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Indian refuses civilization; the African slave is rendered unfit for it. But cher Monsieur: You saw the Indian sitting beside the African on a drape of baize. They were easy together. The sight of them together does not lead you to wonder about a history in which you are not the narrator? These women are but parables of your interest in yourself. Rather than consider the nature of their intimacy, you are preoccupied alone with the meaning of your intrusion.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A boy named Buddy came up beside me in the schoolyard. I don't remember what passed as prologue, but I do not forget what Buddy divulged to me: If you're white, you're all right; If you're brown, stick around; If you're black, stand back. It was as though Buddy had taken me to a mountaintop and shown me the way things lay in the city below.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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" — my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Clunie Public Library in Sacramento, in those last years of a legally segregated America, there was no segregated shelf for Negro writers. Frederick Douglass on the same casement with Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin. Today, when our habit is willfully to confuse literature with sociology, with sorting, with trading in skins, we imagine the point of a "life" is to address some sort of numerical average, common obstacle or persecution. Here is a book "about" teenaged Chinese-American girls. So it is shelved.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The liberal-hearted who run the newspapers and the university English departments and organize the bookstores have turned literature into well-meaning sociology. Thus do I get invited by the editor at some magazine to review your gay translation of a Colombian who has written a magical-realist novel. Trust me, there has been little magical realism in my life since my first trip to Disneyland.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a Catholic idea, actually—that the material world is redeemed; that time is continuous; that one can somehow be redeemed by the faith of an earlier age or a poorer class, if one lives within its shadow or its arrondissement or breathes its sigh.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And lately fashion photographers, bored with Rome or the Acropolis, have ventured farther afield for the frisson of syncretism. Why not Calcutta? Why not the slums of Rio? Cairo? Mexico City? The attempt is for an unearned, casual brush with awe by enlisting untouchable extras. And if the model can be seen to move with idiot stridency through tragedy, then the model is invincible. Luxury is portrayed as protective. Or protected. Austere, somehow—“spiritual.” Irony posing as asceticism or as worldly-wise.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fawning ambition so plainly expressed in the classroom was quite another matter. It wasn’t that I got A’s; other boys got A’s. It was that I wanted my A’s so badly and sought them so blatantly—that’s what everyone saw. Nixon: “I won my share of scholarships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school, not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my more gifted colleagues.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the first televised presidential debate, Nixon thought he was upholding some puritan gravitas by refusing makeup; by choosing the citizen’s black suit; choosing the poor man’s version of natural aristocracy. Nixon was easily the more able in his grasp of history and the workings of government. John F. Kennedy, gold-dusted and ghostwritten, appeared completely natural. Nixon perspired. In an instant, I saw what many other Americans saw that night: Harvard College will always beat Whittier College in America. The game is fixed and there is nothing to be done about it.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am speaking of those years before the middle class took professional wrestling away from the working class and made of our morality play a mockery of ambition.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We grow up thinking that the beautiful and the talented have been born that way, because they are born rich. The boys in the college gym with fine, muscular bodies—I thought they were athletes because of their bodies, not that their bodies were muscular because they were athletes. I thought I was the only one in the world who had to try so hard to become.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Still, from his books, I am convinced Nixon was not a coarse-grained man. Perhaps he was even delicate. Hannah Nixon used to joke that she had wanted a daughter. And she said about Nixon, her famous son, long after he had boarded the train and made something of himself in the world, “He was no child prodigy.” But Hannah also remembered the way young Nixon needed her, as none of her other children did: “As a schoolboy, he used to like to have me sit with him when he studied.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most important thing I learned in college about the rich is that they pursue hobbies”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But middle-class Americans, friends of mine, composites of friends of mine, of a liberal bent, nice people, OK people, see nothing wrong with bilingual education. In fact, they wish their own children to be bilingual. In fact, they send their kids to French schools. In fact, they ask if I know of a housekeeper who might inadvertently teach their children Spanish while she dusts under the piano. Nope.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I was a boy and refused to speak Spanish (because I spoke English), then could not speak Spanish from awkwardness, then guilt, Mexican relatives criticized my parents for letting me “lose it”—my culture, they said.”
Richard Rodriguez (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source