Pam Munoz Ryan Quotes

His touch was warm and Esperanza's heart skipped. She looked at her hand in his and felt the color rushing to her face. Surprised at her own blush, she pulled away from him. She stood and stared at the roses.

Finally, the lawyer came to settle the estate. Mama,

How many others were walking around and not even knowing that someone far away cared for them? Imagine all that love floating in the air, waiting to land on someone's life!

Oh Esperanza!' said Isabel, jumping up and down and clapping.'I think my heart is dancing.

Music does not have a race or a disposition! Every instrument has a voice that contributes. Music is a universal language. A universal religion of sorts. Certainly it's my religion. Music surpasses all distinctions between people -Father

Mrs. Potter said you were a kind and loving soul, underneath all the rest. I guess that means your heart's so sad that it's hard to get out from under the weight. When I was sad about my mother dying, Granny used to say grief is the heaviest thing to carry alone. So I know all about that -Mike

Which is sharper? The hatchet that cuts down dreams? Or the scythe that clears a path for another?

My husband meant for us to live here.

As their shoulders touched, the riverboat was no longer earthbound. With only the two of them aboard, it lifted into the sky, navigating a sea of white billows. The boy was the figurehead beneath the bowsprit, eyes searching for the way. Neftali was the paddle wheel, moving them forward as one ancient spirit.

This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.

Pablo Neruda's poems tramped through the mud [with the fieldworker] ... knocked at the doors of mansions ... sat at the table of the baker ... The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers and said "Do you know him? He is my brother."
The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand. The books traveled over fences ... and bridges ... and across borders ... soaring from continent to continent ... until he had passed thousands of gifts through a hole in the fence to a multitude of people in every corner of the world.

I am poetry,
surrounding the dreamer,
Ever present,
I capture the spirit,
enslave
the reluctant pen,
and become
the breath
on the writer's only road.

He clutched the harmonica to his chest and cried into his pillow. He could have sworn he heard music...the Brahms...first as a child's lullaby, then a mournful lament, and finally, a staccato march, accompanied by the ominous sound of jackboots.

There is no rose without thorns.

Hortensia set the tray down and brought a shawl and wrapped it protectively around Mama's shoulders. Esperanza couldn't remember a time when Hortensia had not taken care of them. She was a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca, with a short, solid figure and blue-black hair in a braid down her back. Esperanza watched the two women look out into the dark and couldn't help but think that Hortensia was almost the opposite of Mama.

Esperanza leaned around the side of the truck. As they rounded a curve, it appeared as if the mountains pulled away from each other, like a curtain opening on stage, revealing the San Joaquin Valley beyond. Flat and spacious, it spread out like a blanket of patchwork fields. Esperanza could see no end to the plots of yellow, brown, and shades of green. The road finally leveled out on the valley floor, and she gazed back at the mountains from where they'd come. They looked like monstrous lions' paws resting at the edge of ridge.

Esperanza! Wake up!" screamed Mama.

Esperanza, that you,

The words he had written wiggled off the page and escaped from the drawer. The letters stacked themselves, one on top of the other. Their towers reached higher and higher until they stood majestic and tall, surrounding Neftali in a city of promise. HUMANITY. SOLIDARITY. GENEROSITY. PEACE. JUSTICE. LOVE. Then a tiny, conceited word came along. Like a hungry termite, it began to gnaw on the tall words, chewing at their foundation, gulping their pulp until they swayed, toppled, and collapsed. All that remained was one fat, satisfied syllable. FEAR.

We are like the phoenix," said Abuelita. "Rising again, with a new life ahead of us.

Although he had changed his name, his history came with him, even to his writing. The rhythm of his rain-soaked childhood became a sequence of words. His memories of the understory of the great forest burst into lyrical phrases, as resinous as the sap of a pinecone, as crisp as the shell of a beetle. Sentences grew long, then pulled up short, taking on the tempo of the waves upon the shore, or swayed gently, like the plaintive song of a lone harmonica. His fury became essays that pointed, stabbed, and burned. His convictions played out with the monotonous determination of a printing press. And his affections became poems, as warm and supple as the wool of a well-loved sheep.

Wait for the fruit to fall into your hand.

Everybody has a heart. Sometimes you gotta work hard to find it -Mouse

... and her name was Freedom.

So blues music is about all the trials and tribulations people got in their hearts from living. It's about what folks want but don't have. Blues is a song begging for its life.

I am poor, but I am rich. I have my children, I have a garden with roses, and I have my faith and the memories of those who have gone before me. What more is there?

Our Land is alive, Esperanza, -Esperanza Rising

What grows [from] the dark soil of disappointment?

Your fate is not yet sealed. Even in the darkest night, a star will shine, a bell will chime, a path will be revealed.

Esperanza means hope in Spanish.

The talk began about bank loans and investments.