Esmeralda Santiago Quotes

#1. I would just as soon remain jamona than shed that many tears over a man.

Esmeralda Santiago

#2. The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter.

Esmeralda Santiago

#3. For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

Esmeralda Santiago

#4. I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

Esmeralda Santiago

#5. It' her life, and she' in the middle of it.

Esmeralda Santiago

#6. They have no achievements of their own. They've made nothing, created nothing, worked at nothing. They will leave no trace that they ever existed. They have no legacy except for their names, which they did nothing to earn.

Esmeralda Santiago

#7. I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.

Esmeralda Santiago

#8. If you don't exist in the arts of a culture, you're invisible. The arts are what express the soul of who we are and that expresses our humanity.

Esmeralda Santiago

#9. There were more fights, more arguments, more yelling in the night, more long absences. Until it seemed as if anything would be better than living with these people who hated each other.

Esmeralda Santiago

#10. People think [immigration] is only about the dollar, but it's so much more complex. This is a place where you can reinvent yourself. I don't know that you can do that anywhere else.

Esmeralda Santiago

#11. How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unkown?

Esmeralda Santiago

#12. What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

Esmeralda Santiago

#13. We're always going to have prejudices ... I don't think we can change society. You can only change individual by individual. And you can change yourself.

Esmeralda Santiago

#14. In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.

Esmeralda Santiago

#15. We came to Macun when I was four, to a rectangle of rippled metal sheets on stilts hovering in the middle of a circle of red dirt.

Esmeralda Santiago

#16. Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

Esmeralda Santiago