# Darling - Author: [Richard Rodriguez](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez.md) - Quotes: 27 - Book page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling ## Quotes > When Cesar Chavez died in his sleep in 1993, not yet a very old man at sixty-six, he died—as he had so often portrayed himself in life—as a loser. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/when-cesar-chavez.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/my-brother-and.md) > No Chavez speech I have read or heard approaches the rhetorical brilliance of the Protestant ministers of the black civil rights [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/no-chavez-speech.md) > During my high school years, a boy from my neighborhood named Malcolm chose me to be his friend for a season. His elbow nudged my book in the public library one Saturday afternoon as he sprawled forward across the table feigning some condition—boredom, I suppose. His voice was like shadow—as whispery and as indistinct as shadow, due to an adolescent change. “Do you want to wrestle?” he asked. I have never met anyone since who speaks as Malcolm spoke: He daydreamed; he pronounced strategies out loud (as I raked elm leaves from our lawn and piled them in the curb)—about how he would befriend this boy or that boy, never anyone I knew; Malcolm went to a different high school. “First,” he said, “I will tease him about his freckles. Then I will tease him about his laugh—how his laugh sounds a little like a whinny sometimes. I won’t go too far. You should see how his wrist pivots as he dribbles down the court. “He’s got these little curls above his sideburns. I wish I had those.” (He would catch me up on the way to the library.) “What are you reading? We read that last year. Not really a war story, though, is it? Want to go eat French toast?” [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/during-my-high.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/on-the-one.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/one-can-become.md) > L.A. likes to think of Las Vegas as the populuxe mirage of Hollywood, a place where middle-class tourists look like movie stars but aren’t, spend like millionaires but aren’t. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/l-a-likes-to-think.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/americans-experience-time.md) > The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/the-prospect-of-a-generation.md) > In a region of mind without coed irony, where women are draped like Ash Wednesday statues (as too hot to handle) and stoned to death on an accusation of adultery (as too insignificant to cry over), men, among themselves, have achieved an elegant ease of confraternity and sentimentality. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/in-a-region.md) > Several days later, I tell a neighbor, a man I know well, that my mother died and that the floor lamp in my bedroom came on during the night. My neighbor is sincerely sorry to hear of my mother’s death; he supposes there must have been some kind of surge in the electrical grid. Our lives are so similar, my friends’ and mine. The difference between us briefly flares—like the lamp in my bedroom—only when I publish a religious opinion. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/several-days-later.md) > The brilliance of Midwestern California, the California that is founded upon discontent, and the reason why so much technological innovation springs from the West Coast, is that having confronted the finitude of the coastline, technologists in Silicon Valley have shrunk the needed commodity—the future (thousands of miles of Zen pathway)—to the size of a fleck of gold dust, to a microchip. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/the-brilliance-of-midwestern.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/something-funny-i-have.md) > It would be another two decades before I came upon the words that made me think I had a story to tell—the opening words of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: “You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.” The immigrant mother’s prohibition to her daughter reminded me of my own mother’s warning about spreading “family secrets.” In the face of California’s fame for blatancy—in the face of pervasive light, ingenuousness, glass-and-aluminum housing, bikinis, billboards—Mrs. Hong recommended concealment. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/it-would-be-another.md) > Nineteenth-century California rewarded only a few of its brotherhood, but it rewarded them as deliriously as an ancient king in an ancient myth would reward. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/nineteenth-century-california-rewarded.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/nothing-else-chavez.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/family-trips-of-my-childhood.md) > My brother is now seventy. His hands are burled with arthritis. Some days he walks with difficulty. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/my-brother-is-now.md) > I never learned to throw a baseball with confidence, but I knew how to aim a newspaper well enough. I could make my mark from the sidewalk—one hand on the handlebar—with deadeye nonchalance. The paper flew over my shoulder; it twirled over hedges and open sprinklers to land with a fine plop only inches from the door. In the growling gray light (San Francisco still has foghorns), I collect the San Francisco Chronicle from the wet steps. I am so lonely I must subscribe to three papers [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/i-never-learned.md) > One night in Boston I went out to dinner with my editor and his wife—this was my first editor, the beloved editor, and I was in awe of him; I still am in awe of him. The editor kissed me on the cheek as we parted and called me his “darling boy,” as if thereby investing me with the Order of Letters Genteel. It was among the happiest nights of my life; I was filled with sadness as I watched the two of them, the editor and his wife, walk away. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/one-night-in-boston.md) > Q: Why do I stay in the Catholic Church? [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/q-why-do-i-stay.md) > 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 [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/the-paradox-of-monotheism.md) > Roles of pathos were available to boys at my high school, but I eschewed them in favor of a role more akin to Prosecutor, Ironist. I advanced by questions. In some more perfect world, like American Bandstand, I suppose I would have been happier in a sexually integrated high school. I knew how to talk to girls. I had two sisters. And I loved to talk. But early nonsexual female companionship would have come at a price. “Sissy” is the chrysalis of “darling.” [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/roles-of-pathos.md) > My skepticism concerning all notions of reconquista is skepticism toward the view that history is restorative. I get older but I do not grow wiser. It is only by shedding skin, by turning pages, by ordering stronger spectacles, by having my hair cut, that I seem to be restoring myself to a circular pattern, that I seem to progress toward youth and capability, though my progress is actually a decline. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/my-skepticism-concerning.md) > At the dawn of a worldwide religious war that Americans prefer to name a war against terror, I feel myself drawn to Islam, drawn to read the Koran, even to kiss the Koran—melodramatically, but sincerely—as I did one evening recently in front of a university audience. I meant to honor Islam. I meant to convey that, as a Christian, I consider myself a loving brother to the Muslim, as I am to the Jew, by the favor of Father Abraham. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/at-the-dawn.md) > America is a faith, perhaps pancakes its sacrament. Opportunity comes to those who put away the disadvantages of family or circumstance and entrust themselves to the future. The point of the American story is simple enough for a child, particularly an immigrant child, to grasp: The past holds no sway in America. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/america-is-a-faith.md) > There are people in every age who come early or late to a sense of the futility of the world. Some people, such as the monks of the desert, flee the entanglements of the world to rush toward eternity. But even for those who remain in the world, the approach of eternity is implacable. “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, / The desert sighs in the bed,” was W. H. Auden’s mock-prophetic forecast. He meant the desert is incipient in the human condition. Time melts away from us. Even in luxuriant weather, even in luxuriant wealth, even in luxuriant youth, we know our bodies will fail; our buildings will fall to ruin. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/there-are-people.md)