Love was a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things, and if anybody knew this to be true it was him.

There's nothing more true in being a child of a diaspora, a child of immigrants. We're completely new to our parents. We're not something they can ever understand. And it's not as if we are ever going to be accepted. We're accepted as long as we conform to what we are expected to be, and I'm sure that's not any different for anyone else.

Once someone gets a little escape velocity going, ain't no play in the world that will keep them from leaving.

She's applying her lipstick; I've always believed that the universe invented the color red solely for Latinas.

[Donald] Trump is what happens in America every time it feels economically and politically threatened, and it encounters the limitations of its own white supremacists practices.

As for my slowness as a writer - that's been a struggle, no question. We live in a culture that values and rewards machine-speed productivity. Even the arts are expected to conform to the Taylor model of productivity.

I never wanted to be away from the family. Intuitively, I knew how easily distances could harden and become permanent.