Victor Villaseñor - Years Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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