Esmeralda Santiago Quotes

We're always going to have prejudices ... I don't think we can change society. You can only change individual by individual. And you can change yourself.

In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.

There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling in the night, more long absences. Until it seemed as if anything would be better than living with these people who hated each other.

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

People think [immigration] is only about the dollar, but it's so much more complex. This is a place where you can reinvent yourself. I don't know that you can do that anywhere else.

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

...and the shortcuts through the woods that led to the next barrio where all sorts of pocavergüenzas took place.

We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt.

The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter.

Ana had experienced reactions like Ramon's in the mirrored salons of Sevilla society, in the waxed halls of the Convento de las Buenas Madres, on the streets of Cadiz and San Juan. It was a look that said, "I see you, but I deign not to speak to you." It said, "I see you but I do not share the high opinion you have of yourself." It said, "I see you but you're not who I want to see." It said, "To me, you don't exist.

If you don't exist in the arts of a culture, you're invisible. The arts are what express the soul of who we are and that expresses our humanity.

They have no achievements of their own. They've made nothing, created nothing, worked at nothing. They will leave no trace that they ever existed. They have no legacy except for their names, which they did nothing to earn.

How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unkown?

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.