Quotes by Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez

Affirmative action ignores our society’s real minorities – members of the disadvantaged classes, no matter what their race. We have this ludicrous bureaucratic sense that certain racial groups, regardless of class, are minorities. So what happens is those “minorities” at the very top of the ladder get chosen for everything.

Class

Race

Real

After the second chapter of Days of Obligation, which is about the death of a friend of mine from AIDS, was published in Harper’s, I got this rather angry letter from a gay-and-lesbian group that was organizing a protest against the magazine. It was the same old problem: political groups have almost no sense of irony.

Death Of A Friend

Gay

Political

Bilingual-education advocates say it’s important to teach a child in his or her family’s language. I say you can’t use family language in the classroom – the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly.

Children

Important

Use

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: “Ports have names they call the sea.” Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use — high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject — there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

Beer

Book

Names

But America isn’t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

America

Country

Home

But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other’s language.

California

Fighting

School

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Doe

Remember

Trying

But very early in life I became part of the majority culture and now don’t think of myself as a minority. Yet the university said I was one. Anybody who has met a real minority – in the economic sense, not the numerical sense – would understand how ridiculous it is to describe a young man who is already at the university, already well into his studies in Italian and English Renaissance literature, as a minority.

Men

Real

Thinking

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

Feelings

Ideas

Mind

For me, diversity is not a value. Diversity is what you find in Northern Ireland. Diversity is Beirut. Diversity is brother killing brother. Where diversity is shared – where I share with you my difference – that can be valuable. But the simple fact that we are unlike each other is a terrifying notion. I have often found myself in foreign settings where I became suddenly aware that I was not like the people around me. That, to me, is not a pleasant discovery.

Brother

Differences

Simple

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America

Athlete

Average

Beautiful

Beer

Believe

Book

Brother

California

Children

Chinese

Cities

Class

Color

Commitment

Country

Courses

Cowboy

Dark

Death Of A Friend

Differences

Diversity

Doe

Doors

Ethnicity

Europe

Evidence

Feelings

Fighting

Forgotten

Gambling

Gay

Giving Up

Glasses

Grandmother

Home

Honesty

Ideas

Immortality

Important

Integrity

Issues

Jobs

Kids

Kind

Knowing

Land

Lasts

Mascots

Mean

The Future Blueprint

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The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

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The Autobiography

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The Behaviour Diary

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Quotes by Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez

Bilingual-education advocates say it’s important to teach a child in his or her family’s language. I say you can’t use family language in the classroom – the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly.

But America isn’t a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

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Topics by Richard Rodriguez

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The Future Blueprint

The Home Therapist: Anti Anxiety

The Autobiography

The Behaviour Diary

The Dating Diary

The Relationship Therapist

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