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Quotes from Brown : The Last Discovery of America — Richard Rodriguez

born 1944 United States

← All quotes by Richard Rodriguez

17 quotes

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

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

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)

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)

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)

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)

The most important thing I learned in college about the rich is that they pursue hobbies

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Attribution

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