Victor Villaseñor Quotes

I now began to collect pubic hair, which I figured was a much safer way to go. I’d look for pubic hair in every bathroom after the girls showered, and in my mind’s eye, I’d try to match up each hair with each girl, all the while imaging her beautiful, luscious, wet, hairy, good-feeling bush. I mean, this was the summer that our pool area just seemed to be full of girls all the time. I was quickly becoming a pubic hair expert

No, my dad had well explained to me that a real man didn’t get offended if other men ridiculed him for staying close to the women of his familia. That a real hombre was proud of being close and loving with the women of his life.

I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED!” I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. “Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE—” I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn’t going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I’d go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.

My father’s mother, a pure-blooded Indian from Oaxaca, had been a gifted fifteen-year-old when Benito Juárez won Mexico’s independence from France. They’d taken her to the Academy of blah-blah-blah in Mexico City, and she’d astonished her European professors by learning French in six weeks.

A few months back Major Terry and his pet student, Drosen, had brought in a guy from San Diego to play chess with me. I’d had no idea that he was rated and was really good, so I’d beaten his ass real fast. He’d gotten all mad at Major Terry and Drosen for not telling him that I was as good as I was. He’d accused them of setting him up to publicly embarrass him. I’d had no idea what the big fuss was all about. I hadn’t even realized that there was such a thing as tournaments and championships for chess just like we had in wrestling. I’d quit playing chess at school after that incident. Now I only played at home with my dad’s older friends, Roberto and Salvador Montoya, who’d both been very good chess players in Mexico City. I beat Roberto almost all the time, but his older brother Salvador beat me pretty regularly. And I’d recently been told that Salvador had been so good that he’d once gone to Cuba to play and that he’d come in third among some of the best international players in the world.

Someone finally understood all the “hell” that I’d been through since a child when I’d first tried to understand language. And yet in other forms of communications, like painting, sculpture, music, math, problem-solving, and chess, I’d been very good. In fact, in high school, once I learned how to play chess, I’d play lightning-fast, intuitively seeing all these different possibilities at the same time, and I’d won well over a hundred chess games without losing a single game. And that included beating some of our faculty members who thought that they were very good at chess.

We're trained to become parrots. We're trained to learn information and give it back at test time. But we're not taught to think. We're not taught how to access the genius.

It was still very hard for me to sometimes know where my Catholic–Christian upbringing stopped and my grandmother’s Indian teachings began. For me it was all like one big river running together with all these different waters.

Later, I heard my brother ask our father why he’d been so generous. “A man can never be too generous,” said our dad, “when he’s generous to a good, hardworking honest hombre, because that man will then break his back to do all he can for you. But…you be generous to a relative or a lazy, no-good worker, and they then think you’re a fool, lose respect for you, and start thinking you owe them something.

The written word is holy…When we write our stories, it helps us bring understanding.

For the very first time, I understood what mi papá had been telling me all these years about his very own father, the great Don Juan, straight from Spain, and how he’d only liked and loved his blue-eyed children, the ones like himself, and had never even recognized his dark Indian-looking children like my dad.

“My dad, he didn’t even have the eyes to see me after all of his tall, blue-eyed sons were dead. He started bellowing from the hilltop to hilltop like a madman, saying that God had forsaken him, and he had nothing more to live for, because all his sons were gone!” Tears streamed down my dad’s face. “I was about nine or ten, the same ag

"Yes," he said. "You see, I, too, have been seeing a lot of things, now that I've been spending so much time at the hospital." He took a deep breath. "One night I got up and went down the hallway to see this woman who was crying. She was an elderly woman and the doctors didn't know what to do for her. She was dying. I held her hand and stroked her forehead like she was a child. She immediately calmed down and was able to pass over in her sleep so peacefully. "The night nurse was furious, and the next morning she told the doctors what I'd done. They, too, became upset, telling me I didn't have the authority to visit other patients. That poor nurse and the doctors, they just weren't prepared to accept the simple truth that they aren't in control. No one is in control, Mundo. We're all just God's guests for a short time." I don't know why, but I now asked, "Joseph, are you dying?" He looked at me straight in the eyes. "Yes, Mundo," he said, "I'm dying."

I took a deep breath, and the humming began behind my left ear. I now knew how I’d solved that math problem in Ashmore’s class. Everything, every thought that came to us came from heaven through our guardian angel, our genius, when we were at peace in our hearts and in balance in our brains. So yes, I was barking up the right tree with all these thoughts and words that were coming out of my mouth. And with such ease.

No, teaching could be done as fast as a lightning bolt. He’d cut across the valleys of my deepest doubts, giving light to the darkest crevices of my beaten-down, inhibited mind, accessing a natural storytelling ability within me that was utterly profound!