Esmeralda Santiago > Quotes

“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, Conquistadora

“For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.”
― Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican

“What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.”
― Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican

“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.”
― Esmeralda Santiago

“Another train will come. Why rush? Why worry? Why go crazy? Another train will come. And sure enough, another train going my way was pulling into the station. My bad mood evaporated. I entered the car smiling, certain that there would be more missed trains in my life, more closed doors in my face, but there would always be another train rumbling down the tracks in my direction.”
― Esmeralda Santiago, The Turkish Lover: A Memoir

“How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unkown?”
― Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora

“The night before I left my mother, I wrote a letter. ”
― Esmeralda Santiago, The Turkish Lover: A Memoir

“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, Conquistadora

“It' her life, and she' in the middle of it.”
― Esmeralda Santiago, America's Dream

“In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.”
― Esmeralda Santiago, Almost a Woman

“Ana had experienced reactions like Ramon's in the mirrored salons of Sevilla society, in the waxed halls of the Convento de las Buenas Madres, on the streets of Cadiz and San Juan. It was a look that said, "I see you, but I deign not to speak to you." It said, "I see you but I do not share the high opinion you have of yourself." It said, "I see you but you're not who I want to see." It said, "To me, you don't exist.”
― Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora

“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, When I Was Puerto Rican