Cristina Henriquez Quotes

I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world.

I know some people here think we're trying to take over, but we just want to be a part of it. We want to have our stake. This is our home, too.

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.

I learned something about grief. I had heard people say that when someone dies, it leaves a hole in the world. But it doesn't, I realized. Arturo was still everywhere. Something would happen and I would think, Wait until I tell Arturo. I kept turning around, expecting to see him. If he had disappeared completely, I thought, it might be easier. If I had no knowledge that he had ever existed, no evidence that he was ever part of our lives, it might have been bearable. And how wrong that sounded: part of our lives. As if he was something with boundaries, something that hadn't permeated us, flowed through us and in us and all around us. I learned something about grief. When someone dies, it doesn't leave a hole and that's the agony.

What I didn't understand - what I suddenly realized now - was that if I stopped moving backwards, trying to recapture the past, there might be a future waiting for me, waiting for us, a future that would reveal itself if only I turned around and looked, and that once I did, I could start to move toward it.

Maybe it's the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.

We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then?

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

The truth was that I didn't know which I was. I wasn't allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn't feel the thing I was supposed to claim.

You could trace it back infinitely. All these different veins, but who knew which one led to the heart?

Immigration is a system and a set of policies. And immigrants are the people behind those policies and behind that system, and the human stories.

I saw us from above, from the sky, two flecks of being connected at the edge of the wide, pale ocean, lost to everything but each other.

You don't understand," my dad said. "They stop you."

"Who? What are you talking about?" my mom asked.

"That's why I was being cautious."

"Who stops you?"

"The police. If you're white, or maybe Oriental, they let you drive however you want. But if you're not, they stop you."

"Who told you that?"

"The guys at the diner. That's what they say. If you're black or if you're brown, they automatically think you've done something wrong."

"Rafa, that's ridiculous. We've lived here for fifteen years. We're citizens."

"The police don't know that by looking at us. They see a brown face through the windshield and boom! Sirens!"

My mom shook her head. "That's what that was about?"

"I didn't want to give them reason to stop me."

"You were driving like a blind man, Rafa. That will give them reason to stop you."

"Everybody else just has to obey the law. We have to obey it twice as well."

"But that doesn't mean you have to go twice as slow as everybody else!"

The light turned green and my dad brought the car out of first. We cruised under the overpass, a shadow draping over the car like a blanket.

"Next time, just try to blend in with everyone else and you'll be fine," my mom offered.

"The way of the world," my dad said.

"What?" my mom asked as we emerged back into the sunlight.

"Ju

I felt the way I often felt in this country - simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore

But it was only a word - justice. It was only a concept, and it wasn't enough.

What if God wants us to be happy? What if there's nothing else around the bend? What if all our unhappiness is in the past and from here on out we get an uncomplicated life? Some people get that, you know. Why shouldn't it be us?

My dad is from Panama; he came to the U.S. in 1971. He came to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He thought he would go back, and then he met my mom here. I was born and mostly raised in Delaware.

You have to believe that you're entitled to happiness.

Physical nearness does not necessarily breed intimacy.

I took his razor from the shower floor, bits of his black hair still caked between the blades. I took his toothbrush from the sink counter and sucked on the bristles, trying to find the taste of him, but there was only the flavor of watery mint toothpaste....I pulled the sheets off the bed with the idea that I could gather up the imprint of him and save it. I thought, I can unfurl the sheets on our old bed at home. I can lie in the creases formed by his body. I can sleep with him again.

I do think all things in moderation. I mean, the thing to me - it actually doesn't bother me very much if people want to read chick lit. But it makes me, you know, sort of disheartened when that's all that people want to read.

And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can't see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they're always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is truly lost, I think.

The characters were not unknown because they were illegal or didn't have the documents but because people didn't want to know them.

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word - you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person.

I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.

Sleep was like wealth, elusive and for other people.

There were torn between wanting to look back and wanting to exist absolutely in the new life they'd created

Armando's not a pork chop, I say. She shrugs. At least a pork chop would feed you.

I'd spent my whole life feeling like that. Like everybody else was onto something that I couldn't seem to find, that I didn't even know existed.I wanted to figure it out, the secret to having the easy life that everyone else seemed to have, where they fit in and were good at everything they tried. Year after year, I waited for it all to fall into place--every September I told myself, This year will be different--but year after year, it was all just the same.