Richard Rodriguez Quotes

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

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.

I take great pride in my literary works. Journalism is much faster. I'm not embarrassed by my journalism. I consider it to be like sketches, like an artist's sketch. I use it later in other writing. But I don't pretend that it has high literary merit either. I can do an essay pretty fast. I do them on airplanes, I do them at hotels, I do them at bus stops sometimes. I've written very good things on the go.

I wanted, however, something more from the new middle-class institution than either the decadent romanticism of the sixties or the careerism of the seventies. I wanted students more aware of their differences from persons less advantaged.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one’s family language.

Certainly in Mexico, the Latin American country I know best, white ascends. Certainly, the whitest dinner party I ever attended was a Mexico City dinner party where a Mexican squire of exquisite manner, mustache, and flán-like jowl, expressed himself surprised, so surprised, to learn that I am a writer. One thought he would never get over it. Un escritor . . . ¿Un escritor . . . ? Turning the word on a lathe of tooth and tongue, until: “You know, in Mexico, I think we do not have writers who look like you,” he said. He meant dark skin, thick lips, Indian nose.

Two women and a child in a glade beside a spring. Beyond them, the varnished wilderness wherein bright birds cry. The child is chalk, Europe's daughter. Her dusky attendants, a green Indian and a maroon slave. The scene, from Democracy in America, is discovered by that most famous European traveler to the New World, Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic son of the Enlightenment, liberal, sickly, gray, violet, lacking the vigor of the experiment he has set himself to observe... His description intends to show the African and the Indian doomed by history in corresponding but opposing ways. (History is a coat cut only to the European.)

During my high school years, a boy from my neighborhood named Malcolm chose me to be his friend for a season. His elbow nudged my book in the public library one Saturday afternoon as he sprawled forward across the table feigning some condition—boredom, I suppose. His voice was like shadow—as whispery and as indistinct as shadow, due to an adolescent change. “Do you want to wrestle?” he asked. I have never met anyone since who speaks as Malcolm spoke: He daydreamed; he pronounced strategies out loud (as I raked elm leaves from our lawn and piled them in the curb)—about how he would befriend this boy or that boy, never anyone I knew; Malcolm went to a different high school. “First,” he said, “I will tease him about his freckles. Then I will tease him about his laugh—how his laugh sounds a little like a whinny sometimes. I won’t go too far. You should see how his wrist pivots as he dribbles down the court. “He’s got these little curls above his sideburns. I wish I had those.” (He would catch me up on the way to the library.) “What are you reading? We read that last year. Not really a war story, though, is it? Want to go eat French toast?”

I never forgot that schooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, it strengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all the things my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books. I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. I remembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had I not so often remembered.

A priest visiting my parish preached a sermon wherein he referred to homosexuality as a “lifestyle.” By which he meant a choice. So, too, my beloved Father O’Neill (to whom I confessed as a child) said to my sister, a few months before he died, that he disapproved of “Richard’s lifestyle.” Homosexuality requires cubism to illustrate itself, perhaps. But homosexuality is not a lifestyle. Homosexuality is an emotion—a physiological departure from homeostasis.

As a young man, I was more a white liberal than I ever tried to put on black. For all that, I ended up a “minority,” the beneficiary of affirmative action programs to redress black exclusion. And, harder to say, my brown advantage became a kind of embarrassment. For I never had an adversarial relationship to American culture. I was never at war with the tongue. Brown was no longer invisible by the time I got to college. In the white appraisal, brown skin became a coat of disadvantage, which was my advantage. Acknowledgment came at a price, then as now. (Three decades later, the price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation.) I remain at best ambivalent about those Hispanic anthologies where I end up; about those anthologies where I end up the Hispanic; about shelves at the bookstore where I look for myself and find myself. The fact that my books are published at all is the result of the slaphappy strategy of the northern black Civil Rights movement.

Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come? We will have hotcakes for breakfast. How can I protect this . . . ? My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry. Of every hue and caste am I.

My reading was scheduled for the six-thirty slot by the University of Arizona. A few hundred people showed up – old more than young; mostly brown. I liked my "them," in any case, for coming to listen, postponing their dinners. In the middle of one of my paragraphs, a young man stood to gather his papers, then retreated up the aisle, pushed open the door at the back of the auditorium. In the trapezoid of lobby-light thus revealed, I could see a crowd was forming for the eight o'clock reading — a lesbian poet. Then the door closed, resealed the present; I continued to read, but wondered to myself: Why couldn't I get the lesbians for an hour? And the lesbian poet serenade my Mexican audience?

His name was William Saroyan. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told... I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write... When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan...

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