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I wanted everything. What could you not want when you are brown and Indian-looking in a society in which the white aesthetic is praised as acceptable?

Ana Castillo

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Ana Castillo
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 15
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Everything
Aesthetic
Acceptable
Brown
Indian
Looking
Society
White
Wanted
Praised

More quotes by Ana Castillo

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Whatever it is that people find that they want to work on they also have to remember that they are human beings and they need to save some time for themselves for personal growth, for mental health, for their families, their loved ones so that they will have the strength to continue doing that work.
Ana Castillo
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Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you.
Ana Castillo
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There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.
Ana Castillo
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We live in a polarized world of contrived dualisms, dichotomies and paradoxes: light vs. dark and good vs. evil. We as Mexic Amerindians/mestizas are the dark. We are the evilor at least, the questionable.
Ana Castillo
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Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.
Ana Castillo
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my Mamá Grande, a tiny Mayan woman, took me aside when I was an adolescent and told me several things that didn't make a bit of sense to my young and inattentive ears, and as young people tend to waste all attempts of our elders to relay to us wisdom accumulated over the decades, I thought my Mamá Grande had a few mice in the attic.
Ana Castillo
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I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.
Ana Castillo
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Between the sun and poverty there was us for a little while.
Ana Castillo
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Human sexuality has been regulated and shaped by men to serve men's needs.
Ana Castillo
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What you perceive as liberal is my independence to choose what i do, with whom, and when. Moreover, it also means that i may choose not to do it, with anyone, ever.
Ana Castillo
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I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.
Ana Castillo
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When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.
Ana Castillo
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In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears).
Ana Castillo
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I've spent my whole life in Chicago being asked where am I from, so that I have a sense of displacement that also is very psychologically disorienting.
Ana Castillo
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I feel that it's very important for young people to have a sense of history and do research and don't re-invent the wheel and don't think that you're the first martyr to discover social injustice but to take advantage of previous generations of activists and find out what they did and how they resolved things.
Ana Castillo
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Poverty has its advantages. When you're that poor what would you have that anyone would want? Except your peace of mind. Your dignity. Your heart. The important things.
Ana Castillo
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To all the women and the men who ever loved me just a little.
Ana Castillo
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There are things coming from me that I felt I wanted to talk about. My search for my own blend of spirituality, my acknowledgement of my sexuality, my being the single mother of a young man.
Ana Castillo
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People like to think of themselves as purists, but there is no such thing as purity, when there exists so much contact.
Ana Castillo
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I was just, like, not at all the office type I was the artist type.
Ana Castillo