Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston Quotes

#1. I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

#2. Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

#3. When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

#4. You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

#5. That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

#6. The reason I want to remember this is because I know we'll never be able to do it again.

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston