Quote

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

Richard Rodriguez

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Rodriguez
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: July 31
Journalist
Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Time
Voice
Rooms
Crowd
Intimates
Words
Move
Crowds
Quiets
Language
Leave
Deny
Recede
Moving
Stand
Finally
Uttering
Death
Within
Window
Passes
Away
Dark
Close
Trapped
Truth
Faces
Doors
Intimacy
Way
Family
Room
Voices

More quotes by Richard Rodriguez

Image
So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I find L.A. very interesting, partly because I think something new is forming there, but not in a moment of good fellowship as you might think from all this diversity claptrap. It's not as if we'll all go down to the Civic Center in our ethnic costumes and dance around.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
There is San Diego - this retirement village, with its prim petticoat, that doesn't want to get too near the water. San Diego worries about all the turds washing up on the lovely, pristine beaches of La Jolla. San Diego wishes Mexico would have fewer babies. And San Diego, like the rest of America, is growing middle-aged.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
The popular idea of a role model implies that an adult's influence on a child is primarily occupational, and that all a black child needs is to see a black doctor, and then this child will think, Oh, I can become a doctor too.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a role model to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's in that intersection that I find the energy of the essay.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
Henry Ford didn't just create a cheap way of getting away from your in-laws he basically understood that there was something in us as a culture that wanted to be on the move, that wanted to get out.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
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
Image
Who knows what Yale thought it was getting when it hired Richard Rodriguez? The people who offered me the job thought there was nothing wrong with that. I thought there was something very wrong. I still do. I think race-based affirmative action is crude and absolutely mistaken.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn't had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. You take the rest — my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I came from a white middle class neighborhood. Was I expected to go back there and teach the woman next door about Renaissance sonnets? The embarrassing truth of the matter was that I was being chosen because Yale University had some peculiar idea about what my skin color or ethnicity signified.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I keep trying to tell people that Los Angeles is already the largest Indian city in the U.S., that there are Toltecs playing Little League baseball in Pasadena, Mayans making beds at the Marriott in Westwood, and Chichimecs driving buses in L.A. Los Angeles is a majority-Indian city.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
I think it's an important thing for a Mexican to say, especially now with the rebellion in Chiapas. Mexico has to confront her Indian face, and yet she refuses to do so. When you turn on Mexican television, it's like watching Swedish TV: everyone is blond.
Richard Rodriguez
Image
In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various.
Richard Rodriguez