Richard Rodriguez Quotes

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .

How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?

I don't feel very good about myself. People always leave me. Nobody can stand me for very long. I wish I could cut my tongue out, or take out the part of my brain that has opinions. Or cares. I wish I could be simple. Be quiet, introverted, or shy. I'm half way in between a wallflower at a party and Elvis Presley. People love one or the other. In between is no place to be.

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

I don't want to die saying but, you know? There's so much I want to do, so I want more time.

What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?

If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!

Every now and then, I’d meet a guy and think that we were getting along great, and suddenly I’d stop hearing from him. Not only did he stop calling, but if I happened to bump into him sometime later he always acted like I had the plague. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t. And it bothered me. It hurt me. With time, it got harder and harder to keep blaming the guys, and I eventually came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with me. That maybe I was simply meant to live my life alone.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.

I had been alone more than I could have been had I gone by myself.

THE DEATH OF LEOPOLD GURSKY Leopold Gursky started dying on August 18, 1920. He died learning to walk. He died standing at the blackboard. And once, also, carrying a heavy tray. He died practicing a new way to sign his name. Opening a window. Washing his genitals in the bath. He died alone, because he was too embarrassed to phone anyone. Or he died thinking about Alma. Or when he chose not to.

And yet I understood the alienation of being around others who couldn't really see you or chose not to. I'd felt the self-loathing that came with being a fraud, protraying an image of what you wished you could be but weren't. I'd lived with the fear that people you loved might turn away from you if they ever got to know the true person hidden inside.

Some people feel like they don't deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.

Being myself didn't work. Being someone else didn't work. Maybe I just wasn't meant to have friends.

I think that there's part of me that feels like maybe I should have been more social.

Scary is time passing and sickness and dying and regret and isolation and loneliness and relationship problems - as opposed to a guy in a hockey mask, which didn't seem that scary.

The only time I really become discouraged is when I think of all the things I would like to do and the little time I have in which to do them.

there are worse things than being alone but it often takes decades to realize this and most often when you do it's too late and there's nothing worse than too late

An entire life of solitude contradicts the purpose of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea of more terror.

I think my real fear is that I will get to old age and think I spent too much time concerned about the way that I look and other bullshit. That's really a fear of mine.

She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.

It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me 7that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.