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Richard Rodríguez Quotes
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Richard Rodriguez is an American writer who became famous as the author of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez , a narrative about his intellectual development. Wikipedia  

✵ 31. July 1944
Richard Rodríguez photo
Richard Rodríguez: 127   quotes 1   like

Richard Rodríguez Quotes

“Q: Why do I stay in the Catholic Church?
A: I stay in the Church because the Church is more than its ignorance; the Church gives me more than it denies me. I stay in the Church because it is mine.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

“As you see yourself, I once saw myself; as you see me now, you will be seen.”

Richard Rodríguez

Quoting a Mexican proverb in "Night and Day" in Frontiers (1990)

“It's the technology. There is this thing between you and the viewer. The viewer is watching this magnifying glass, and technology exaggerates you. You are left with the sense of how small you are, not with the sense of how big you are—if you're smart. If you're dumb you begin to believe that you are the image—that you cannot be replaced. But you can be replaced in a minute. For every Madonna there's another. For every Dan Rather there's another.”

Richard Rodríguez

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

Sense

“I wanted, however, something more from the new middle-class institution than either the decadent romanticism of the sixties or the careerism of the seventies. I wanted students more aware of their differences from persons less advantaged.”

Richard Rodríguez

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

Personality

“The sole religious orthodoxy permitted in our public schools is the separation of paper from plastic. Not so many miles from this beach, great-grandchildren of westering pioneers chain themselves to redwoods, martyrs of the new animism.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

School , Animals

“In the Clunie Public Library in Sacramento, in those last years of a legally segregated America, there was no segregated shelf for Negro writers. Frederick Douglass on the same casement with Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin. Today, when our habit is willfully to confuse literature with sociology, with sorting, with trading in skins, we imagine the point of a "life" is to address some sort of numerical average, common obstacle or persecution. Here is a book "about" teenaged Chinese-American girls. So it is shelved.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Life , Books , Imagination , Girl

“Americans experience time in two distinct ways—as religious people and as people of no religion. Just so, we experience ourselves as a historical people and as people who are not implicated by history.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

People , Religion , Way , History

“No one in the United States has ever matched the confidence of that gentleman’s insult. I believe it would not occur to the deepest-dyed racist in the United States to question whether I am a writer. The racist might say I look like a monkey, but he would not say I don’t look like a writer.”

Richard Rodríguez

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Self-confidence , Confidence , Question

“I wrote to my brother a few years ago. I told him I was bored with his e-mails about religion. Bored with his scientific perspective, as he calls it. Bored with political faith. I asked him to stop.”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Faith , Religion

“TSS: Who is your audience then?”

Richard Rodríguez

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

“I noticed my brother sent copies of his e-mail to his nephews and nieces, as well as to our siblings. The wonder is not that he knows so much about Church history, but that such matters continue to preoccupy him. Why not let it go?”

Richard Rodríguez

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013)

Siblings , History

“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.”

Richard Rodríguez

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

Business , Love , Making love , Learning