America Is in the Heart Quotes

“Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“It is but fair to say that America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers. America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of freemen.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“This is the beginning of your life in America,” Julio said. “We'll take a freight train from Sunnyside and go to nowhere.” “I would like to go to California,” I said. “I have two brothers there—but I don't know if I could find them.” “All roads go to California and all travelers wind up in Los Angeles,” Julio said. “But not this traveler. I have lived there too long. I know that state too damn well….” “What do you mean?” I asked. Suddenly he became sad and said: “It is hard to be a Filipino in California.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black body dangling on a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate—We are America!”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“We in America understand the many imperfections of democracy and the malignant disease corroding its very heart. We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can find happiness. It is a great wrong that anyone in America, whether he be brown or white, should be illiterate or hungry or miserable. “We must live in America where there is freedom for all regardless of color, station and beliefs. Great Americans worked with unselfish devotion toward one goal, that is, to use the power of the myriad peoples in the service of America’s freedom. They made it their guiding principle. In this we are the same; we must also fight for an America where a man should be given unconditional opportunities to cultivate his potentialities and to restore him to his rightful dignity.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“This is also what critical reading of our histories makes possible: we cannot repair what we cannot reconcile; we cannot truly know what we will not truly see.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“Critical reading returns you to your life with renewed eyes; it deepens the world for you, inasmuch as it deepens you for the world.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“Critical reading is a civic act; it’s the kind of reading that asks you to be both sharp and vulnerable to both the world of the book and the world the book emerges from; the kind of reading that asks you to bear witness to the things in a book that speak low and deep to some low and deep part of you, which might not always say easy or comforting things.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“This is the greatest responsibility of literature: to find in our struggle that which has a future. Literature is a living and growing thing. We must destroy that which is dying, because it does not die by itself.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I remembered all my years in the Philippines, my father fighting for his inherited land, my mother selling boggoong to the impoverished peasants. I remembered all my brothers and their bitter fight for a place in the sun, their tragic fear that they might not live long enough to contribute something vital to the world. I remembered my own swift and dangerous life in America. And I cried, recalling all the years that had come and gone, but my remembrance gave me a strange courage and the vision of a better life. “Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words,” I sobbed.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“Why was America so kind
and yet so cruel? Was there no way to simplifying things in this
continent so that suffering would be minimized? Was there no
common denominator on which we could all meet?
I was angry
and confused, and wondered
if
I would ever understand this
paradox.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I had never trusted college-bred leaders because, in my experience, when the crucial moment came, they were not to be found.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“. . . it’s only in giving the best we have that we can become a part of America.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I knew it was hard to die. It was hard to live I had discovered, but it was even harder to die. Why did some men live thoughtlessly? Why did they think life was something they could borrow from other men?”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“It is a great wrong that anyone in America, whether he be brown or white, should be illiterate or hungry or miserable.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I had tried to keep my faith in America, but now I could no longer. It was broken, trampled upon, driving me out into the dark nights with a gun in my hand. In the senseless days, in the tragic hours, I held tightly to the gun and stared at the world, hating it with all my power. And hating made me lonely, lonely for love, love that could resuscitate beauty and goodness. For it was life I aspired for, a life of goodness and beauty.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I felt ashamed. But it was another lesson: the persecuted were always the first victims of misunderstanding.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I saw his eyes and I knew that the philosophers lied when they said death was easy and beautiful. I knew that there was nothing better than life, even a hard life, even a frustrated life. Yes, even a broken-down gambler’s life. And I wanted to live.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“was surprised to know that after eight years in the United States I had only one old blue suit, a cheap suitcase, and three shirts.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“was a planless life, hopeless, and without direction. I was merely living from day to day: yesterday seemed long ago and tomorrow was too far away.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“Was it possible that, coming to America with certain illusions of equality, I had slowly succumbed to the hypnotic effects of racial fear?”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“Why was America so kind and yet so cruel?”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I knew that even if I went back to them, after many years of loneliness in another land, I would not be able to pick up where I had left off.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“I do not remember all that Miss Mary Strandon said to me in parting. But I remember her saying that she would like me to come someday to her home town of Spencer, Iowa. She told me that the trees there were as luxuriant as in Baguio. Fifteen years afterward I went to Spencer, hoping to find her. But she had been dead for more than ten years. I wrote her name on a copy of my first book and donated it to the local library. I think she would have been happy to know that; I would someday write a book about her country.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“It was both a religious and an economic war, for in those early days of global vandalism the sword and the cross went together.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

“Do you remember how old you were when you first read a book that had a character who looked and lived like you in it?”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

“There is something wrong in our country when a man can take away something that belongs to you and your family.”
― Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History