Richard Rodriguez Short Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

View all Richard Rodriguez Quotes
It is education that has altered my life. Carried me far.

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

Richard Rodriguez
There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

Richard Rodriguez
I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

Richard Rodriguez
In tragic cultures, the old have something to teach the young. And they are believed.

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

Richard Rodriguez
My brother is now seventy. His hands are burled with arthritis. Some days he walks with difficulty.

Richard Rodriguez
Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.

Richard Rodriguez
Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

Richard Rodriguez
I was the student at Stanford who remembered to notice the Mexican-American janitors and gardeners working on campus.

Richard Rodriguez
I grew up victim to a disabling confusion. As I grew fluent in English, I no longer could speak Spanish with confidence.

Richard Rodriguez
No Chavez speech I have read or heard approaches the rhetorical brilliance of the Protestant ministers of the black civil rights

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez
L. A. likes to think of Las Vegas as the populuxe mirage of Hollywood, a place where middle-class tourists look like movie stars but aren't, spend like millionaires but aren't.

Richard Rodriguez
On the other hand I tell my true intimates that what I write is not intended for them. In fact I'd prefer they never read it. When I write, I'm talking to somebody I intend to never meet.

Richard Rodriguez
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.

Richard Rodriguez