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Richard Rodríguez: 254 quotes1 like

“The most important thing I learned in college about the rich is that they pursue hobbies”

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“Two women and a child in a glade beside a spring. Beyond them, the varnished wilderness wherein bright birds cry. The child is chalk, Europe's daughter. Her dusky attendants, a green Indian and a maroon slave.
The scene, from Democracy in America, is discovered by that most famous European traveler to the New World, Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic son of the Enlightenment, liberal, sickly, gray, violet, lacking the vigor of the experiment he has set himself to observe… His description intends to show the African and the Indian doomed by history in corresponding but opposing ways.”

Richard Rodríguez

History is a coat cut only to the European.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“Family trips of my childhood always began with a prayer. I suppose when one goes on vacation, one is courting death in some fashion, tying the morgue tags onto one’s suitcase. But then, too, vacations are respites from death, from thoughts of death. I have sometimes wondered why friends under medical death sentences have undertaken arduous trips or undertaken arduous labors. To put some distance between themselves and death—the obvious answer.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“But it's a very interesting part of my life. It really is a much more sexual book than I have ever tried before. It's also about Hollywood. What I did in those years was I saw the world. And I literally traveled all over the world because I was kept, and I knew five star hotels. I know where to stay in Geneva, and I know where to stay in Bangkok, and I know that because I sat at swimming pools and read the fashion magazines for hours in Geneva. I know what to do in Buenos Aires, what restaurants to go to, where the pretty people go for lunch.”

Richard Rodríguez

Violating the Boundaries: An Interview with Richard Rodriguez (1999)

“And lately fashion photographers, bored with Rome or the Acropolis, have ventured farther afield for the frisson of syncretism. Why not Calcutta? Why not the slums of Rio? Cairo? Mexico City? The attempt is for an unearned, casual brush with awe by enlisting untouchable extras. And if the model can be seen to move with idiot stridency through tragedy, then the model is invincible. Luxury is portrayed as protective. Or protected. Austere, somehow—“spiritual.””

Richard Rodríguez

Irony posing as asceticism or as worldly-wise.
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“It would be another two decades before I came upon the words that made me think I had a story to tell—the opening words of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.” The immigrant mother’s prohibition to her daughter reminded me of my own mother’s warning about spreading “family secrets.” In the face of California’s fame for blatancy—in the face of pervasive light, ingenuousness, glass-and-aluminum housing, bikinis, billboards—Mrs. Hong recommended concealment.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“So little is said about the scholarship boy in pages and pages of educational literature. Nothing is said of the silence that comes to separate the boy from his parents.”

Richard Rodríguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

“After all that Richard Nixon had written about how hard work wins the day in America, finally it was Nixon who arranged for me to bypass the old rules. Through the agency of affirmative action, akin to those pivotal narrative devices in Victorian fictions, I had, suddenly, a powerful father in America, like Old Man Kennedy. I had, in short, found a way to cheat. The saddest part of the story is that Nixon was willing to disown his own myth for political expediency. It would be the working-class white kid—the sort he had been—who would end up paying the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys. Affirmative action defined a “minority” in a numerical rather than a cultural sense. And since white males were already numerically “represented” in the boardroom, as at Harvard, the Appalachian white kid could not qualify as a minority. And since brown and black faces were “underrepresented,” those least disadvantaged brown and black Americans, like me, were able to claim the prize of admission and no one questioned our progress.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“Dissembling was the specialty of Broadway musicals. The storylines were scrupulously heterosexual. What could I have heard in them that made me think they explained me? It was this: The innocent characters were so wonderfully compromised by the actors who played them; by the writers and musicians who created them. The scar tissue on voices. The makeup on faces. Youth! The wicked stage! The jaded legend refreshed the innocence of my youth. Musical comedy songs were more real than my life because they were articulate and because they had ligaments of narrative attached to them. For today’s young queers and lonelys, these songs must seem quaint and campy and not useful. But they were never campy for me—for us?—they only became camp in the attempt to share them without embarrassment.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual.”

Richard Rodríguez

Source: Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“His name was William Saroyan. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told… I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city — in New York or Paris — in order to write… When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. … Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy… In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan…”

Richard Rodríguez

"Time Of Our Lives" (26 May 1997) http://www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan_6.html

“The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgment within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox—only unfathomable singularity”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“The reason I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s stupid face was I had a crush on him. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty years since my last confession. I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s beautiful face. How many times? At what velocity? The priest does not ask if I intended to mar the face. One of the things I love about the church is that motive is assumed: Because I am human. What alone interests the confessor is the form of humanity I wish to confess. Confession is constructed as we are constructed. The confessional box prefigures the American I. I am the sinner, irreducible. My soul is irreducible. Not my red hand.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

“My skepticism concerning all notions of reconquista is skepticism toward the view that history is restorative. I get older but I do not grow wiser. It is only by shedding skin, by turning pages, by ordering stronger spectacles, by having my hair cut, that I seem to be restoring myself to a circular pattern, that I seem to progress toward youth and capability, though my progress is actually a decline.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“There are people in every age who come early or late to a sense of the futility of the world. Some people, such as the monks of the desert, flee the entanglements of the world to rush toward eternity. But even for those who remain in the world, the approach of eternity is implacable. “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed,” was W. H. Auden’s mock-prophetic forecast. He meant the desert is incipient in the human condition. Time melts away from us. Even in luxuriant weather, even in luxuriant wealth, even in luxuriant youth, we know our bodies will fail; our buildings will fall to ruin.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“I never learned to throw a baseball with confidence, but I knew how to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my mark from the sidewalk—one hand on the handlebar—with deadeye nonchalance. The paper flew over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open sprinklers to land with a fine plop only inches from the door. In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“I became a man by becoming a public man.”

Richard Rodríguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

“When I sought admission to graduate schools, when I applied for fellowships and summer study grants, when I needed a teaching assistantship, my Spanish surname or the dark mark in the space indicating my race—‘check one’—nearly always got me whatever I asked for.”

Richard Rodríguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982)