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Richard Rodriguez Quotes

born 1944 United States

Richard Rodriguez (born 31 July 1944) Mexican-American writer, associate editor with the Pacific News Service in San Francisco, an essayist for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and the Los Angeles Times.

United States
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Random Richard Rodriguez quote

38 quotes

The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light.

As you see yourself, I once saw myself; as you see me now, you will be seen.

My brother is now seventy. His hands are burled with arthritis. Some days he walks with difficulty.

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Q: Why do I stay in the Catholic Church?

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

The sight of them together does not lead you to wonder about a history in which you are not the narrator?

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

I became a man by becoming a public man.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

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

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Nineteenth-century California rewarded only a few of its brotherhood, but it rewarded them as deliriously as an ancient king in an ancient myth would reward.

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Americans are so individualistic, they do not realize their individualism is a communally derived value.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

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.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

It is a kind of possession, reading. Willing the Other to abide in your present.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

L.A. likes to think of Las Vegas as the populuxe mirage of Hollywood, a place where middle-class tourists look like movie stars but aren’t, spend like millionaires but aren’t.

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

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.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Why couldn't I get the lesbians for an hour? And the lesbian poet serenade my Mexican audience?

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

I was the student at Stanford who remembered to notice the Mexican-American janitors and gardeners working on campus.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

To watch people on their phones in a crowd is to notice how disconnected they seem; how unprepared for solitude they seem. Neurosis, yes. Novelty is the American neurosis.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

It is education that has altered my life. Carried me far.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

Americans experience time in two distinct ways—as religious people and as people of no religion. Just so, we experience ourselves as a historical people and as people who are not implicated by history.

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Richard Rodriguez (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.