38 quotes
I remember Carl T. Rowan, in other words, as myself, as I was. Perhaps that is what one mourns.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
I grew up victim to a disabling confusion. As I grew fluent in English, I no longer could speak Spanish with confidence.
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
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.
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
The most important thing I learned in college about the rich is that they pursue hobbies
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
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.
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
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.
Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)
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.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at sixty-six, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser.
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)
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.
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
No Chavez speech I have read or heard approaches the rhetorical brilliance of the Protestant ministers of the black civil rights
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)
The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgment within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox—only unfathomable singularity
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)
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.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
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.
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
It interests Americans that Canada is clean and empty and unimplicating; the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist. Without distinct music or food or capacity for rudeness— less rich, less angry, less complicated, less neurotic, less dark, less brilliant.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
The sole religious orthodoxy permitted in our public schools is the separation of paper from plastic. Not so many miles from this beach, great-grandchildren of westering pioneers chain themselves to redwoods, martyrs of the new animism.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual.
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)
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.
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)
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.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)