Best 10 quotes of Elaine Castillo on MyQuotes

As for loving America or not loving America, those aren't your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn't about you.

One day one of the girls, Felt, says to the group: You know how they say rich people have red heels? You have, in fact, always heard this growing up: that poor people have dusty, gray heels, and rich people have smooth, moisturized heels, red with health. You have a tendency to hide your feet, even though you've always rubbed cream into them religiously so they won't look like your mother's heels, desert-cracked. Well, I have a trick, Fely says, showing all of you her smooth, impossibly red heels. You just put merthiolate on it! Not iodine, that makes it orange. Merthiolate is the secret! After that, all of you take to staining your heels with the liquid antiseptic. From then on, you love wearing slingbacks, mules, cropped trousers. Years later, even as an adult nurse in California, sometimes you'll still put merthiolate on your heels.

she doesn’t have a fate. A fate. You know what it’s like to have a fate; you also know what it’s like to escape one. . . . As for loving America or not loving America, those aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.

There are mercies, and there are mercies.

What Hero loved most wasn’t the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kasama, pakikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn’t quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capacious form of the word with: with as verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of with-ing.

You already know that the first thing that makes you foreign to a place is to be born poor in it; you don't need to emigrate to America to feel what you already felt when you were ten, looking up at the rickety concrete roof above your head and knowing that one more bad typhoon would bring it down to crush your bones and the bones of all your siblings sleeping next to you; or selling fruit by the side of the road to people who made sure to never really look at you, made sure not to touch your hands when they put the money in it. You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.

You don’t ever really stop having a song. It’s easier to stop having a person than to stop having a song.

You know what it's like to have a fate; you also know what it's like to escape one.

You know what you really are—before being loved, before being missed. You're a pathway. You might be a pathway, but so is he.

You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.