Cristina Henriquez Quotes

#1. My dad is from Panama; he came to the U.S. in 1971. He came to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He thought he would go back, and then he met my mom here. I was born and mostly raised in Delaware.

Cristina Henriquez

#2. Certainly, I read a lot and follow the news. But as a writer, I am not interested in a political story. I am searching for the humanity of the characters. I never set out to write a book about an 'issue.'

Cristina Henriquez

#3. I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature.

Cristina Henriquez

#4. I do think all things in moderation. I mean, the thing to me - it actually doesn't bother me very much if people want to read chick lit. But it makes me, you know, sort of disheartened when that's all that people want to read.

Cristina Henriquez

#5. I understood how easily and how quickly things could be snatched away.

Cristina Henriquez

#6. What if God wants us to be happy? What if there's nothing else around the bend? What if all our unhappiness is in the past and from here on out we get an uncomplicated life? Some people get that, you know. Why shouldn't it be us?

Cristina Henriquez

#7. I saw us from above, from the sky, two flecks of being connected at the edge of the wide, pale ocean, lost to everything but each other.

Cristina Henriquez

#8. Sleep was like wealth, elusive and for other people.

Cristina Henriquez

#9. Immigration is a system and a set of policies. And immigrants are the people behind those policies and behind that system, and the human stories.

Cristina Henriquez

#10. I couldn't swallow. It had to be wrong. We had to be able to rewind. It couldn't be real. It felt so weightless. It felt like an idea, a particle of dust floating around in the air that hadn't landed yet.

Cristina Henriquez

#11. Physical nearness does not necessarily breed intimacy.

Cristina Henriquez

#12. We stood side by side and looked out at the vastness, the possibility of everything out there. Within the universe, I felt like a speck, but within myself I felt gigantic, the salt air filling my lungs, the roaring of the waves rushing in my ears.

Cristina Henriquez

#13. Armando's not a pork chop, I say. She shrugs. At least a pork chop would feed you.

Cristina Henriquez

#14. The characters were not unknown because they were illegal or didn't have the documents but because people didn't want to know them.

Cristina Henriquez

#15. I felt the way I often felt in this country - simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore

Cristina Henriquez

#16. What kind of place required a man to work all day without being allowed to eat or drink? There had to be rules, didn't there? This was America, after all.

Cristina Henriquez

#17. I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

Cristina Henriquez

#18. The truth was that I didn't know which I was. I wasn't allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn't feel the thing I was supposed to claim.

Cristina Henriquez

#19. You shouldn't want to be like everyone else. Then you wouldn't be like you.

Cristina Henriquez

#20. I know some people here think we're trying to take over, but we just want to be a part of it. We want to have our stake. This is our home, too.

Cristina Henriquez

#21. My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me.

Cristina Henriquez

#22. There were torn between wanting to look back and wanting to exist absolutely in the new life they'd created

Cristina Henriquez

#23. Maybe it's the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place.

Cristina Henriquez

#24. It was as if, when her father spoke, her mother looked at him and saw a little goldfish, popping open his mouth over and over again but making no sound. And when her mother spoke, her father looked and saw a piranha doing the same thing.

Cristina Henriquez

#25. I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world.

Cristina Henriquez

#26. But it was only a word - justice. It was only a concept, and it wasn't enough.

Cristina Henriquez

#27. Because a place can do many things against you, and if it's your home or if it was your home at one time, you still love it. That's how it works.

Cristina Henriquez

#28. You can come back one day. Or I could come there."
"Maybe."
"I could find you."
"Finding is for the things that are lost. You don't need to find me, Mayor.

Cristina Henriquez

#29. And I would discover how much of life is defined by what you want to keep and what you are forced to lose.

Cristina Henriquez

#30. People do what they have to in this life. We try to get from one end of it to the other with dignity and with honor. We do the best we can.

Cristina Henriquez