Richard Rodriguez Quotes - Page 3

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• Of course, San Diego chooses not to regard the two cities as one. Talk about alter ego: Tijuana was created by the lust of San Diego. Everything that was illegal in San Diego was permitted in Tijuana. When boxing was illegal in San Diego, there were boxing matches in Tijuana; when gambling was illegal, there was always Tijuana.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Cities, Two, Gambling

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  9 Copy quote

• I've once gotten in trouble with certain gay activists because I'm not gay enough! I am a morose homosexual. I'm melancholy. Gay is the last adjective I would use to describe myself. The idea of being gay, like a little sparkler, never occurs to me. So if you ask me if I'm gay, I say no.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Gay, Ideas, Lasts

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  6 Copy quote

• Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Home, Ideas, Firsts

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  6 Copy quote

• Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Father, Justice, Diversity

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  "Brown : The Last Discovery of America". Book by Richard Rodriguez, 2003.

  4 Copy quote

• The average age in the U.S. is now thirty-three, whereas Mexico gets younger and younger, retreats deeper and deeper into adolescence. Mexico is fifteen. Mexico is wearing a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt and wandering around Tijuana looking for a job, for a date, for something to put on her face to take care of the acne.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Jobs, Average, Rocks

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  7 Copy quote

• We're looking at complexity. We're looking at blond kids in Beverley Hills who can speak Spanish because they have been raised by Guatemalan nannies. We're looking at Evangelicals coming up from Latin America to convert the U.S. at the same time that L.A. movie stars are taking up Indian pantheism.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Stars, Latin, Kids

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  7 Copy quote

• You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Block, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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, Rose

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

  29 Copy quote

• Of course, since we don't see the Indian as a living figure - having turned the Indian into a kind of mascot for the ecology movement, a symbol of prehistory - we can't see the Indian among us.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Movement, Kind, Mascots

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  6 Copy quote

• If you want to live in Tennessee, God bless you, I wish for you a long life and starry evenings. But that is not where I want to live my life. I want to live my life in Carthage, in Athens. I want to live my life in Rome. I want to live my life in the center of the world. I want to live my life in Los Angeles.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Rome, Long, Wish

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  18 Copy quote

• Those people who say that America is finite are some sense right. The environmental movement, for example, has a great wisdom to it: we need to protect, to preserve, to shelter as much as we need to develop. But I think this always has to be juxtaposed against the optimism of old, which is now represented in part by immigrants. I would like to see America achieve a kind of balance between optimism and tragedy, between possibility and skepticism.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Thinking, America, Optimism

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the existing categories. I call these kids the "Keanu Reeves Generation," after the actor who has a Hawaiian father and a Welsh mother.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Mother, Father, Kids

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  8 Copy quote

• But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other's language.

  Richard Rodriguez

  School, Fighting, California

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gringo arrogance. It's as though whites and blacks can imagine America only in terms of each other. It's mostly white arrogance, in that it places whites always at the center of the racial equation.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Country, Two, White

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• It is not simply that these two cities are perched side by side at the edge of the Pacific; it is that adolescence sits next to middle age, and they don't know how to relate to each other. In a way, these two cities exist in different centuries. San Diego is a post-industrial city talking about settling down, slowing down, building clean industry. Tijuana is a preindustrial city talking about changing, moving forward, growing. Yet they form a single metropolitan area.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Moving, Talking, Cities

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  9 Copy quote

• There is San Diego - this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San Diego worries about all the turds washing up on the lovely, pristine beaches of La Jolla. San Diego wishes Mexico would have fewer babies. And San Diego, like the rest of America, is growing middle-aged.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Baby, Beach, Retirement

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  6 Copy quote

• What has happened in the last generation is that Tijuana has become a new Third World capital - much to the chagrin of Mexico City, which is more and more aware of how little it controls Tijuana politically and culturally. In addition to whorehouses and discos, Tijuana now has Korean factories and Japanese industrialists and Central American refugees, and a new Mexican bourgeoisie that takes its lessons from cable television.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Cities, Mexican, Mexico

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Doors, Ethnicity, Color

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Jobs, Thinking, Race

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• I don't think writers should be convenient examples. I don't think we should make people feel settled. I don't try to be a gadfly, but I do think that real ideas are troublesome. There should be something about my work that leaves the reader unsettled. I intend that.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Real, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Virginia, Hands, Sweaters

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  7 Copy quote

• The popular idea of a role model implies that an adult's influence on a child is primarily occupational, and that all a black child needs is to see a black doctor, and then this child will think, "Oh, I can become a doctor too."

  Richard Rodriguez

  Children, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

• I think the universities have co-opted the intellectual, by and large. But there is an emerging intellectual set coming out of Washington think tanks now. There are people who are leaving the universities and working for the government or in think tanks, simply looking for freedom.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Thinking, Government, People

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

  4 Copy quote

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