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Quotes from Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez — Richard Rodriguez

born 1944 United States

← All quotes by Richard Rodriguez

9 quotes

I became a man by becoming a public man.

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

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)

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

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Attribution

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