Crazy Loco Love Quotes

“Words were empty! Empty! EMPTY! Words were HOLLOW, and yet it was through these hollow labels called words that I viewed the whole world. I called a person black, and I assumed that … that I knew everything about that individual. I call a person a Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, a Republican, a Democrat, a homosexual, and I immediately assumed that I knew everything about them, too. I suddenly understood with utter clarity that I saw no one or anything, because all I saw, I saw through a filter of words. My eyes filled with tears. I was one great big PENDEJO! No wonder I’d locked myself in my room after that miracle of the belt buckle. I hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone or… or to put into words what had happened to me. It was too precious, and to talk about it, to”
― Victor Villaseñor, Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir

“I took a step back. He was right. I did have a problem. I… I… I was racist. I’d become that which I’d hated all my life. These guys didn’t see themselves as black and white and brown as I did. They simply saw themselves as Latinos, as cubanos and panameños and mexicanos, and… and as brothers. I gripped my head. My mind was reeling. I decided to go outside to get some fresh air. The air was crisp and clean. I took a big, deep breath. Then it hit me like a sledgehammer between the eyes. Then words weren’t reality. They were “labels” that were placed on reality. I began to shiver, this thought WAS SO GREAT! Then words were like maps, and a map could tell us about a state or nation, but a map wasn’t that state or nation any more than words were the person or place we were referring to. I mean, I could get a map that laid out the freeway systems of California, the towns and cities, and I could get another map that laid out the rivers and mountain ranges, the valleys, the different types of vegetation at different elevations, and yet all this information would still never give me the reality of California.”
― Victor Villaseñor, Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir

“On Sunday, I listened to classical music in the park. I’d never realized that classical music could massage the brain and actually dissolve the knots of anger I’d been carrying inside my gut ever since I started school and was humiliated for not speaking English. In fact, I’d never really realized how much my stomach had been hurting all of these years, until now… now that I was in México and the knots started dissolving.”
― Victor Villaseñor, Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir

“was finding my soul in México, and my soul’s color was turquoise, a healing color, as I found out from a street vendor. This was why people wore turquoise jewelry around their necks and wrists and ears, to bring in the healing spirits of the sea and the sky.”
― Victor Villaseñor, Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir

“She’d been blinded by the blasting sand. My father was twelve years old and sure they were going to die. But his old mother had gripped him and jerked him close and told him they were not going to die. They were going to live and for him to not give up. That for every broken, lost human being there was in the world, there was another who’d seen worse and had not given up. That people could go on and on no matter what if they kept their faith in God. And she’d promised my dad they would live, and she herself would live long enough to see him grow into manhood and marry. And she did it; old and broken she’d lived long enough to complete her word. “You are not quitting,” I heard a voice say deep within me with utter clarity. “We were blind. We were unable to breathe. The sand came through mi sarape and tore the skin off our bodies, and yet we never ever lost faith. How could we? A whole army of people are within each of us, helping us, guiding us. You are not alone, mijito,” I heard the voice say. “YOU HAVE FAMILIA!”
― Victor Villaseñor, Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir