Hunger of Memory Quotes

“But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

“To many persons around him, he appears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself. They expect—they want—a student less changed by his schooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic way unchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changing from the person one was. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannot reconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroom and offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—a man with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation’s political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“My parents would say something to me and I would feel embraced by the sounds of their words. Those sounds said: I am speaking with ease in Spanish. I am addressing you in words I never use with los gringos. I recognize you as someone special, close, like no one outside. You belong with us. In the family.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

“Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one’s family language.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize my academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents. This is my story.”
― Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory

“I work to support my habit of writing.”
― Richard Rodríguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez