{ "type": "author", "site": { "name": "Leafy Quotes", "language": "en", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com" }, "formats": "Every page has two versions with the same data: JSON (the page address + .json) and markdown (the page address + .md). Append .json or .md to any `url` in this document.", "name": "Richard Rodriguez", "slug": "richard-rodriguez", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez", "json": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez.json", "markdown": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez.md", "image": null, "quotes_count": 45, "books": [ { "title": "Brown", "slug": "brown", "quotes_count": 15, "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin-books/richard-rodriguez/brown_978-01-4200-079-3.jpg", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown" }, { "title": "Darling", "slug": "darling", "quotes_count": 11, "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin-books/richard-rodriguez/darling_978-01-4312-588-4.jpg", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling" }, { "title": "Hunger of Memory", "slug": "hunger-of-memory", "quotes_count": 19, "cover": "https://quivercdn.com/covers/dial-press-trade-paperback/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory_978-05-5338-251-8.jpg", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/hunger-of-memory" } ], "recent_quotes": [ { "id": "cdb3fff0-ad05-4b9b-b116-a35999821d2c", "slug": "my-brother-and", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/my-brother-and", "text": "My brother and I have, after many years, achieved our importance to each other as a difference. Because it is sometimes difficult for my brother to climb the steps to my apartment, he will often come by and we will sit in his car and talk. We quite enjoy one another’s company. My brother is no less a good man for not believing in God; and I am no better a man because I believe. It is simply that religion gives me a sense—no, not a sense, a reason, no, not exactly a reason, an understanding—that everyone matters.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "faith", "slug": "faith", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/faith" }, { "name": "family", "slug": "family", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/family" }, { "name": "atheism", "slug": "atheism", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/atheism" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "a938b29c-a8f6-440c-bab9-846eab3dc118", "slug": "on-the-one", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/on-the-one", "text": "On the one side, the Mexican side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the American side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and depression, when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American dream.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "irony", "slug": "irony", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/irony" }, { "name": "dreams and aspirations", "slug": "dreams-and-aspirations", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/dreams-and-aspirations" }, { "name": "America", "slug": "america", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/america" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "a8452cf0-b3f5-49fa-bc7e-5a6f9c4749c3", "slug": "one-can-become", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/one-can-become", "text": "One can become overwhelmed on vacation—I have become so—by thinking thoughts that are too large. There is a condition identified in psychology textbooks as the Stendhal syndrome, also called, or related to, the Jerusalem syndrome, that describes a tourist’s overwhelmed response to great works of art or to a sudden apprehension of scale, antiquity, multitude, death—the accompanying fear is of one’s insignificance, but also of squandered opportunity.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "fear", "slug": "fear", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/fear" }, { "name": "art", "slug": "art", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/art" }, { "name": "travel", "slug": "travel", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/travel" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "9b8b6cce-6110-4178-9f54-982b7de7609f", "slug": "americans-experience-time", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/americans-experience-time", "text": "Americans experience time in two distinct ways—as religious people and as people of no religion. Just so, we experience ourselves as a historical people and as people who are not implicated by history.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "religion", "slug": "religion", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/religion" }, { "name": "history", "slug": "history", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/history" }, { "name": "time", "slug": "time", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/time" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "3b630348-aedc-4dff-bf54-ccf1e5359023", "slug": "something-funny-i-have", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/something-funny-i-have", "text": "Something funny I have noticed—perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves? They want exactly what they tell you you no longer need, you pathetic, overweight, disembodied Kindle reader. They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a café table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair; they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London; they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and Do Not Disturb signs and views of the park. And in order to reserve these things for themselves they will plug up your eyes and your ears and your mouth, and if they can figure out a way to pump episodes of The Simpsons through the darkening corridors of your brain as you expire (ADD TO SHOPPING CART), they will do it.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "hypocrisy", "slug": "hypocrisy", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/hypocrisy" }, { "name": "technology", "slug": "technology", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/technology" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "23733b35-178a-4194-ad21-189c5f950c34", "slug": "nothing-else-chavez", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/nothing-else-chavez", "text": "Nothing else Chavez wrote during his life had such haunting power for me as that public prayer for a life of suffering; no utterance sounded so Mexican. Other cultures in the world assume the reality of suffering as something to be overcome. Mexico assumes the inevitability of suffering. That knowledge informs the folk music of Mexico, the bitter humor of Mexican proverb. To be a man is to suffer for others—you’re going to suffer anyway.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "suffering", "slug": "suffering", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/suffering" }, { "name": "culture", "slug": "culture", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/culture" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "10f4e32f-0784-43c4-9fd2-2443d8306790", "slug": "family-trips-of-my-childhood", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/family-trips-of-my-childhood", "text": "Family trips of my childhood always began with a prayer. I suppose when one goes on vacation, one is courting death in some fashion, tying the morgue tags onto one’s suitcase. But then, too, vacations are respites from death, from thoughts of death. I have sometimes wondered why friends under medical death sentences have undertaken arduous trips or undertaken arduous labors. To put some distance between themselves and death—the obvious answer.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "death", "slug": "death", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/death" }, { "name": "travel", "slug": "travel", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/travel" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:48" }, { "id": "fedc3288-43bc-4fca-828a-ff302117096a", "slug": "the-other-night", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/the-other-night", "text": "The other night at a neighborhood restaurant the waiter, after mentioning he had read my books, said about himself, “I’m white, I’m nothing.” But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America—the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance. And I achieved it.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "freedom", "slug": "freedom", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/freedom" }, { "name": "identity", "slug": "identity", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/identity" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Brown_:_The_Last_Discovery_of_America_(2003)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:47" }, { "id": "feab5ff5-850b-4b15-8205-b4f948bfb63d", "slug": "it-is-one", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/it-is-one", "text": "It is one thing to know your author-man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.\n\nHow a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: \"Self-Help\" or \"Health.\" There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew — only that — a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as \"Judaica.\" There is no shelf for irony.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "identity", "slug": "identity", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/identity" }, { "name": "literature", "slug": "literature", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/literature" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Brown_:_The_Last_Discovery_of_America_(2003)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:47" }, { "id": "e5bba522-9ecc-4c0c-9385-f566dfd599e0", "slug": "its-a-catholic", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/its-a-catholic", "text": "It’s a Catholic idea, actually—that the material world is redeemed; that time is continuous; that one can somehow be redeemed by the faith of an earlier age or a poorer class, if one lives within its shadow or its arrondissement or breathes its sigh.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "faith", "slug": "faith", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/faith" }, { "name": "poverty", "slug": "poverty", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/poverty" }, { "name": "the church", "slug": "the-church", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/the-church" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Brown_:_The_Last_Discovery_of_America_(2003)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:47" }, { "id": "d60b7ebf-9d06-4353-80b4-a8511a85b804", "slug": "the-paradox-of-monotheism", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/the-paradox-of-monotheism", "text": "The paradox of monotheism is that the desert God, refuting all other gods, demands acknowledgment within emptiness. The paradox of monotheism is that there is no paradox—only unfathomable singularity", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "religion", "slug": "religion", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/religion" }, { "name": "god", "slug": "god", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/god" }, { "name": "emptiness", "slug": "emptiness", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/emptiness" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:47" }, { "id": "cd7983fc-bd8b-41bd-8b5c-459f841fa61d", "slug": "it-interests-americans", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/brown/it-interests-americans", "text": "It interests Americans that Canada is clean and empty and unimplicating; the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist. Without distinct music or food or capacity for rudeness— less rich, less angry, less complicated, less neurotic, less dark, less brilliant.", "language": "en", "character": null, "chapter": null, "chapter_parent": null, "page": null, "verified": false, "original": null, "other_languages": [], "topics": [ { "name": "humor", "slug": "humor", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/humor" }, { "name": "irony", "slug": "irony", "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/irony" } ], "source": { "name": "Wikiquote", "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Brown_:_The_Last_Discovery_of_America_(2003)", "license": { "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" } }, "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:52:47" } ] }