# Quote — Richard Rodriguez, Darling

> 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.

- Author: [Richard Rodriguez](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez.md)
- Book: [Darling](https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rodriguez#Darling:_A_Spiritual_Autobiography_(2013)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/richard-rodriguez/darling/something-funny-i-have

## More from this book

> 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)