76 quotes found
“Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.”
“Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes child...”
“This is how you lose her.You lose her when you forget to remember the little things that mean the world to her: the sincerity in a strangers voice during a trip to the grocery store, the delight of...”
“What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, ...”
“That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.”
“They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Thainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon draw...”
“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of yo...”
“Instead of finding himself in nerd heavenwhere every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play withhe woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, we...”
“Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran up and said, Excuse me, but your stupid roommate is goi...”
“You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and split...”
“Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when were out in the world, well be lucky ...”
“I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They su...”
“if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”
“It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even t...”
“Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for r...”
“You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.”
“In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a pas overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergencera as Santo D...”
“I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.”
“Lets just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.”
“Before there was an American Story, before Paterson spread before Oscar and Lola like a dream, or the trumpets from the Island of our eviction had even sounded, there was their mother, Hypatia Beli...”
