Ana Castillo Quotes

Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you.

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.

When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes

I was just, like, not at all the office type; I was the artist type.

And if you believe in God, I think She doesn't work that way either.

But what had really happened, unfortunately, as ideal as it started out to be, was not that they had succeeded in becoming one, but that they had become neither.

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.

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.

The man you love cooking for you is good for you too.

According to our social pyramid, all men who feel displaced racially, culturally, and/or because of economic hardships will turn on those whom they feel they can order and humiliate, usually women, children, and animals
just as they have been ordered and humiliated by those privileged few who are in power. However, this definition does not explain why there are privileged men who behave this way toward women.

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.

You are a ghost, like you were a ghost before because you were never here, but everywhere at once, i wish i could talk like my eyes can see, word you with what i smell, knock your socks off with aromas of a tiny metropolis tourists only catch glimpses of at the Wharf. A thousand LSD trips and middle-aged folks remembering Timothy Leary playing like a Pied Piper leading them all off to jump off the pier.

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?

To all the women and the men who ever loved me just a little.

It is an absolute impossibility in this society to reversely sexually objectify heterosexual men, just as it is impossible for a poor person of color to be a racist. Such extreme prejudice must be accompanied by the power of society's approval and legislation. While women and poor people of color may become intolerant, personally abusive, even hateful, they do not have enough power to be racist or sexist.

Paris, true to its promise, had been a place of civilized indecencies, or uncivil decencies ...

Women Are Not Roses Women have no beginning only continual flows. Though rivers flow women are not rivers. Women are not roses they are not oceans or stars. i would like to tell her this but i think she already knows.

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.

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.

Hell = where we get rid of all the lies told to us. That's where we go and cry like rain. Mom, hell is where you go to see yourself.

Our goal should be to achieve joy.

I'm concerned about a lot of serious border issues. This book is about the border reality and the struggles of the undocumented worker.

Protect him, yes, with my life; spare him of learning responsibility and to take care of himself, no. During

No, it's too much. I should never have let you know that I was here. After all, there was no reason to tell you. It was just that we landed and I was sucked up by the tentacles of this, your city, and your name and that summer that were all inseparable and I called as soon as I put my bag down on the bed in this room.

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.

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).

Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal cultural progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived, as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U. S. legislature when they saw they couldn't get rid of us. If we won't go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all.

I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.

Women endure the labor of childbirth and men send themselves to war! But I gave birth to eight children and never once did I cry like I saw some of those men out there before they even fired their first shot! I think it has something to do with the unnaturalness of killing compared to the naturalness of giving birth.

A good lover will do that, see something worthwhile in you that you never knew was there. And when there's something you don't like to see in yourself a good lover won't see it either.

Something about giving himself over to a woman was worse than having lunch with the devil ...

You say your city the way some Americans say this is their country. You never feel right saying that - my country. For some reason looking Mexican means you can't be American.