Victor Villaseñor Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
I liked him. He seemed a lot more animal to me than human, which was good, of course, because my grandmother, Doña Guadalupe, had always explained to me that all humans were born with an animal-spirit to help guide them through life, and so the humans who realized this would always seem more animal than human, and this was wonderful. It kept us closer to God.

Victor Villaseñor
A whole bunch of people towards the back of the room were now getting up to leave. But these teachers were not going to intimidate me. I wasn't my father's and mother's son for nada-nothing. I wasn't my two indigenous grandmothers' grandson for nada-nothing either. I came from a long line of people…who'd lived through starvation, revolutions, and massacre. AND YOU! I yelled into the microphone. Over there in the back…who are getting up to leave…I'M GLAD THAT YOU'RE LEAVING!

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
Mexican kids were now speaking quite a bit of English. Even Ramón. But he was a changed kid. There was a darkness in his eyes like a horse that had just been beaten one too many times.

Victor Villaseñor
It was the greatest learning summer of my whole life, but then came the fall, and I was told that I'd have to go back to school again. NO WAY, JOSÉ! I screamed, because I now knew that at school they were trying to break us, not amanzar us.

Victor Villaseñor
You know, we've got to be careful about what we believe that this Church tells us, said my dad. Remember, she's the one who stole all the best lands de México for herself and enslaved all the Indians that she didn't kill off.

Victor Villaseñor
His name was Howard, but by the way he said it, none of us were able to figure out what his name was for the first few days. Still, I liked him, so one day I tackled him out on the playground and we started wrestling on the grass.

Victor Villaseñor
Papa always explained to me that there is no such thing as a kids' game. That there are only games with which kids are learning the facts of life, but it's the parents that are so tapados—so blind and constipated that they can't see what these games are really all about.

Victor Villaseñor
When my brother, Joseph, was sick and in the hospital, you got in bed with me when I was asleep and you kept trying to touch me! All these years I'd thought that maybe it was all a dream, but it wasn't! You son of a bitch. I was eight years old, crazy with grief for my brother, Joseph, and you—how could you?!

Victor Villaseñor
Marina, I said, I don't know how to explain this, but … well, everything I say or do or even think just doesn't seem to work out for me. Except when I'm totally alone. I almost added, Totally alone with God, but I didn't because I knew how crazyloco this might sound, especially since I wasn't a priest or a monk.

Victor Villaseñor
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!

Victor Villaseñor
My grandmother—God bless her soul—a Yaqui Indian from northern Mexico, was the greatest teacher I'd ever had! And do you know what she taught me, she taught me that each and every day is un milagro given to us by God, and that work, that planting corn and squash with our two hands is holy. She taught me all this with kindness and invitation. Not with ridicule and looking down her nose at me and making me feel like less than human when I didn't get it at first.

Victor Villaseñor
Sex and love were driving the whole world and me crazyloco! I just couldn't stand it anymore! I was going to have to kill myself.

Victor Villaseñor
In the last three months I hadn't lost one single game of chess. It was crazyloco, but sometimes I thought that I was so brilliant because I could see what other people couldn't see or understand even after I'd explain it to them. Playing chess wasn't about making single moves. It was about seeing patterns, then backing up inside your mind and seeing the last five and six moves of your opponent, then flashing forward real fast. And bingo, the whole chessboard became alive in living patterns.

Victor Villaseñor
I talked for hours, and for the first time in my life, I could see that I'd lived two very different lives ever since I'd started school. On the ranch I'd lived a life full of love and work and warm, good feelings. At school I'd been treated with so much … physical and mental abuse that I was still filled with so much rage; it was hard for me to even think about it.

Victor Villaseñor
It was truly a good thing that I'd found writing as my outlet or I was sure I would have become a mass murderer, killing all those heartless, racist teachers who'd beat us Mexican kids down since kindergarten

Victor Villaseñor
Suddenly I remembered Jeannie Windflow, who'd taught me how to kiss when we were kids. At the age of seventeen, she'd run off with a Mexican guy from Pozole Town who was nineteen years old, had a job, and was one of the handsomest guys I'd ever seen. He was a semi-professional boxer and real dark. She was a track star, a straight-A student, and real blonde.

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
Because the most important thing any man can do in all his life is pick the right woman to breed with—I mean, marry first, then breed, because from the woman comes the— —comes the instinct to survive, I said, having heard this for as long as I could remember. Good, said mi papa,

Victor Villaseñor
The truth was that we still spoke Spanish every chance we got. And why, because, simply, it felt good to hear in the sound of the language with which our mothers had rocked us to sleep when we'd been little.

Victor Villaseñor
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

Victor Villaseñor
He stared at me. You barely know how to read and you have decided to become a great writer? he said to me in a voice full of shock and arrogance. I'd finally had enough of him. Yes! I bellowed, going into my wrestling stance. I don't know how to read, and I've decided to become a great writer—WHAT OF IT?

Victor Villaseñor
Promise me, he said, that you'll say nothing, and if something happens to me, you'll always honor our parents. I swallowed. He was scaring me. Look, he continued, I've met a lot of rich kids and their parents at the Academy, and I'll tell you, there are no parents that I'm prouder to have as my father and mother than ours. They rose up with nothing, Mundo, except guts and faith and love. Do you understand? I shook my head. No, I don't, I said. He licked his lips. He seemed to be licking his lips all the time now. You will, he said. You just pay close attention, and you will.

Victor Villaseñor
First of all, said Dr. Nacozi to me, I want you to know that I realize you have a brilliant mind. Me? I said, feeling shocked. Yes, you, he said. And maybe you haven't done that well in school in the past, but this is all about to change very rapidly for you, because the further you go in university life, the more apt you are to find minds like your own. I never had many friends until I got into graduate school. Before that … well, I always felt confused and lost, he said, laughing. And not very capable with the girls and in my social life, either.

Victor Villaseñor
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

Victor Villaseñor
I nodded. This was something that I really liked a lot about my mother and father. They were always thinking ahead so we didn't make the same mistake twice.

Victor Villaseñor
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.

Victor Villaseñor
DO YOU HEAR ME? I now screamed to the heavens, driving this information into the deepest crevices of my mind. I, VICTOR EDMUNDO VILLASEÑOR, TAKE THIS HOLY OATH BEFORE YOU, GOD ALMIGHTY, as your son, to write my people's story WITH ALL MY HEART AND SOUL! I'll write! I'll do my part with all the power and intensity that I put into wrestling, hunting, trying to castrate myself, and chess!

Victor Villaseñor