Victor Villaseñor Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

E as you, but he couldn't see me, because I was dark and Indian-looking and didn't have blue eyes like him. Your mother and me, we are not going to forget you and your sisters like my father forgot me. I swear it!

Victor Villaseñor
Seeing my mother's red shoes disappear, I almost leaped up screaming again, but then, the boy next to me said, Calmate, in Spanish, we're going to be okay, mano. I turned and looked at this boy. My God, his Spanish sounded so soft and comforting, and he was the most darkly handsome boy that I'd ever seen. His eyes were as large and beautiful as a goat's eyes. Looking at him, I stopped crying.

Victor Villaseñor
You are a man now, and to be un hombre, a man must not only know right from wrong, he must also know who he is and who he isn't. Because if a man doesn't know who he is and who he isn't, then no matter how much he knows about right and wrong, he will always be like a fish out of water.

Victor Villaseñor
So, keep your powder dry and dig in for a long, fruitful life of being a writer, that storyteller around the campfire of your people and your generation. Your trade is as old as time, and your main job is to uplift the human heart so that then we can go on with dignity and fair play. That's it

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
He knocked the chess set off his desk, screaming at me, You're not a stupid Mexican! You're just lazy! I'm one of the best chess players in all Carlsbad and you treat me with no respect! I was shocked. All my life I'd been called stupid because I was Mexican, not because I was lazy. This was really good.

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
Dog, cats, horses, all animals could do this at will much easier than us humans, Rosa and her husband Emilio, had explained to me, because animals were much closer to God than we humans were.

Victor Villaseñor
Marina was about eight years older than my sister Tencha, so this made her about eighteen years older than me. She was presently a reporter for the New York Times. When she was in high school, she'd won the Underwood Typewriter typing contest, doing well over a hundred words a minute without a single mistake, setting a national record. She attributed her fast hands to her cotton-picking days as a young girl in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Victor Villaseñor
I still wanted to tell our teacher about how the Indian people who'd worked on the ranch for us had explained to me that Shep, who'd always loved my brother more than life itself, had disappeared, because he'd run off to the highest hilltop to intercept my brother's soul so he could lead my brother's soul back to heaven.

Victor Villaseñor
YOU'VE GOT RAGE. THEN YOU RETURN TO THE STATES WITH THAT RAGE! YOU DON'T RUN AWAY! You saw bad, terrible things happen to you and other Mexican kids in school, then YOU DON'T CHICKENSHIT OUT! No, you go back, and you do something with that rage that will MAKE A DIFFERENCE for all those kids! That's the beauty of the United States! Even the little guy can fight back!

Victor Villaseñor
Here, a man and woman unite for life, but they include in their union all the loves they will live through in their lifetime. But over there, it's all about changing wives and changing husbands, searching for that one perfect amor.

Victor Villaseñor
My mother, a woman, told me this, and I'll tell you, mijo, that you will learn who you are and who you aren't in the next four or five years, because not to learn who you are and who you aren't in the next few years, my mother said, is to be missing the most important part of your whole life.

Victor Villaseñor
Then I was almost thirty years old when I wrote Macho!, and finally got published after 265 rejections. Immediately, I returned to this book you're reading, thinking I could now pull it off, but I was wrong.

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
That night my parents told me what my cousin had suggested. I said no, absolutely not! I turned and walked away as fast as I could. My parents really had no idea how much it had hurt me all these years to go to school. I was done with all book learning.

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
Suddenly, I wondered what the hell was going on. Ramón had been the smartest and most capable guy in our whole grade in thinking and figuring out things, and he'd been considered dumb, too. And now Gus, he was also the smartest guy of all of us during recess and he just said that he'd been flunked before. This didn't make any damn—I mean, blessed—sense to me at all! The smartest kids I knew were all considered stupid.

Victor Villaseñor
Eve, I said, please stop for a minute. I think I finally get it. As you read to me aloud, the words become alive for me, and I can see pictures in my head. But when I try to read, all those little letters just confuse me. Because it's the white of the page between the words that truly grab me. Do I make any sense? Reading, I do believe, is a very unnatural thing. But to listen to a story, like sitting around a campfire, is very natural.

Victor Villaseñor
No, I wasn't very smart, this I knew, but I was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, I was some kind of crazy-loco genius, burro genius. I mean, to have been able to hold on to my Spirit for this long had to mean something.

Victor Villaseñor
You just remember, mijito, whenever your wife comes screaming at you that she's going to kill you because you forgot her birthday, that what she's really saying is 'I love you, I depend on you for my life and love, and so this is why I hate you and want to kill you!' It's always with our wife, our best friends, and our relatives that we end up having most of our troubles in life, mijito.

Victor Villaseñor
Every year right after the Christmas holidays, our IQ scores were posted on the bulletin board at the Academy. We, the juniors and seniors, had taken our tests several weeks ago, and for the last few days we were all nervous wrecks waiting to see our results. Of course, we were all told that what was really crucial for us to get into the college of our choice was the grade point average of our last two years of high school, plus our SAT scores. But we knew that our IQ score could also make a big difference because our IQ, we'd been told, was what gave us a true measure of our intelligence. So if we hadn't worked real hard in school or hadn't tested well in our college entrance exams, then our IQ could make all the difference.

Victor Villaseñor
I began to realize that my parents were going to build the biggest damn house in the whole town! I was shocked! Are we rich? I asked my brother. Yes, he said. We are? Then why do I always wear dirty, old work clothes? I asked. Because we're ranchers, said my brother. We're not city people. Oh, I said, then it's okay for us to be dirty? We aren't dirty, he said, laughing. To be dirty means you never wash. We wash our clothes and take baths all the time. It's just that people that live on a ranch get dirt on themselves. My eyes went big. I'd never thought of this. My brother was really smart.

Victor Villaseñor
My God, it was really coming true. The higher and higher I climbed in education, the more I was finding people I could talk to.

Victor Villaseñor
The Indians, were like the weeds. That roses you had to water and give fertilizer or they'd die. But weeds, indigenous plants, you gave them nada-nothing; hell, you even poisoned them and put concrete over them, and those weeds would still break the concrete, reaching for the sunlight of God. That's the power of our people, my father would tell me, we're the weeds, LAS YERBAS DE TODO EL MUNDO!

Victor Villaseñor
Look, said Jake, last night, after you went to bed, we told your dad how we'd come across you running away from home. You did? I said. Yes, we did. It was the honest thing to do, son. And you should've seen the hurt look on your dad's face, because, you see, Mexican kids don't run away from home. White kids, gringo kids, like me and Luke, we're the ones who run from home, but Mexicans, they ain't never do that.

Victor Villaseñor
All I knew was that I'd flunked the third grade twice because I couldn't learn to read, had a terrible time all through grammar school and high school. Then after ten years of writing, I was finally able to sell my first book to a leading mass-market paperback publisher in New York.

Victor Villaseñor
Suddenly, I don't know how to explain it, the chess pieces seemed to come alive for me. It was like I could now see the chess pieces moving on the board on their own. I started beating everybody. I, the slowest of the slow, had now gone something like a hundred games without losing. I could do no wrong. It was magical how the pieces spoke to me, showing me where to move.

Victor Villaseñor
Oh, I loved Mr. Moffet! He was WONDERFUL! He'd given me hope! I felt fearless once again, and I could clearly see it had always been fear that had kept me dammed up all these years. Fear of sin, fear of hell, fear of what people might think of me, fear of … of … I didn't quite know how to say or even think all these thoughts I was having, and yet… it was like I was now so excited with all these thoughts racing around inside my brain that I was on fire. Maybe I wasn't really stupid after all. Maybe I'd just been misled all these years from the very beginning. OH, A FIRE FOR WANTING TO LEARN ALL I COULD LEARN WAS NOW BURNING INSIDE ME!

Victor Villaseñor
I laughed. I could see her point completely, because in Spanish you'd never say, I think I love you, especially after four years. That would be an insult. You'd say, I feel love for you so deeply that when I just think of you, I start to tremble and feel my heart flutter. Why? Because Spanish is a feeling-based language that comes first from the heart, just as English is a thinking-based language that comes first from the head.

Victor Villaseñor