Richard Rodriguez Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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?

  Richard Rodriguez

  Religious, Watches, Courses

  50 Copy quote

• 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

  "A View From the Melting Pot: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez". Interview with Scott London, www.scottlondon.com. August 1997.

  32 Copy quote

• Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Mean, America, Mexican

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  26 Copy quote

• Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Ideas, Feelings, Mind

  Source: www.believermag.com

  28 Copy quote

• I think what education gives you is a voice. It gives you a way of talking to a judge. When a policeman pulls you off to the side of the road, you have a voice. When you cross a border, you have a voice. When you are writing to express your opinions, you have a voice.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Writing, Thinking, Talking

  Source: www.believermag.com

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  "Hunger of Memory". Book by Richard Rodriguez, 1982.

  19 Copy quote

• There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Stranger

  Richard Rodriguez (2004). “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez”, p.200, Bantam

  24 Copy quote

• So, rather than becoming multicultural, rather than becoming a person of several languages, rather than becoming confident in your knowledge of the world, you become just the opposite. You end up in college having to apologize for the fact that you no longer speak your native language.

  Richard Rodriguez

  College, Opposites, Native Language

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  9 Copy quote

• But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Trying, Doe, Remember

  Richard Rodriguez (2004). “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez”, p.53, Bantam

  19 Copy quote

• I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Writing, Race, America

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.8, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

• Maybe the American Dream is too rich for us now in the U.S. Maybe we're losing it because we are not like our Swedish grandmother who came across the plains, hacked down the trees, and took the Spanish words she encountered and made them hers. Now her great-great-grandchildren sit terrified, wondering what to do with all these Mexicans. The American Dream is an impossible affirmation of possibility. And maybe native-born Americans don't have it anymore. Maybe it has run through their fingers.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Running, Dream, Grandmother

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  15 Copy quote

• In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Country, Children, Home

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Team, Kids, White

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.13, Penguin

  12 Copy quote

• Language is a social event.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Events, Language, Social

  8 Copy quote

• I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Two, California, Worry

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  15 Copy quote

• 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, Names

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.17, Penguin

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Richard Rodriguez (1993). “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father”, Penguin Group USA

  12 Copy quote

• The fact that we're all hyphenating our names suggests that we are afraid of being assimilated. I was talking on the BBC recently, and this woman introduced me as being "in favor of assimilation." I said, "I'm not in favor of assimilation." I am no more in favor of assimilation than I am in favor of the Pacific Ocean. Assimilation is not something to oppose or favor - it just happens.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Ocean, Names, Talking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  13 Copy quote

• 'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?"

  Richard Rodriguez

  Block, Mean, Ghetto

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  9 Copy quote

• 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, Energy, Way

  16 Copy quote

• Learning can cause social fracture. Your people start expressing themselves.

  Richard Rodriguez

  People, Causes, Social

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Immortality, Unhappiness, Evidence

  Richard Rodriguez (1993). “Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father”, Penguin Group USA

  5 Copy quote

• What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Baby, Nine, Way

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  15 Copy quote

• But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don't think of myself as a minority. Yet the university said I was one. Anybody who has met a real minority - in the economic sense, not the numerical sense - would understand how ridiculous it is to describe a young man who is already at the university, already well into his studies in Italian and English Renaissance literature, as a minority.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Real, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• When the Irish nun said to me, "Speak your name loud and clear so that all the boys and girls can hear you," she was asking me to use language publicly, with strangers. That's the appropriate instruction for a teacher to give. If she were to say to me, "We are going to speak now in Spanish, just like you do at home. You can whisper anything you want to me, and I am going to call you by a nickname, just like your mother does," that would be inappropriate. Intimacy is not what classrooms are about.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Girl, Mother, Teacher

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  8 Copy quote

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