Best 12 quotes of Esmeralda Santiago on MyQuotes

Another train will come. Why rush? Why worry? Why go crazy? Another train will come. And sure enough, another train going my way was pulling into the station. My bad mood evaporated. I entered the car smiling, certain that there would be more missed trains in my life, more closed doors in my face, but there would always be another train rumbling down the tracks in my direction.

if you don't exist in the arts of a culture, you're invisible. The arts are what express the soul of who we are and that expresses our humanity.

In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.

People think [immigration] is only about the dollar, but it's so much more complex. This is a place where you can reinvent yourself. I don't know that you can do that anywhere else.

Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

We're always going to have prejudices ... I don't think we can change society. You can only change individual by individual. And you can change yourself.

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.

In the Spanish-speaking Americas, Christmas is much more than a one-day event followed by a staggering credit card bill. The festivities last for weeks, beginning well before Christmas, and continuing straight through to the arrival of the Three Kings and the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. Las Navidades involves a lot more partying and a lot less shopping than a US. Christmas.

n the tropical climates of the Caribbean and the temperate climes of South America, where Christmas falls smack in the middle of summer, there is no Santa arriving on a sleigh, no jingle bells in the snow, no stockings hung on the mantel with care. it's a holiday for family, for grown-ups as well as children, celebrated with plenty of traditional food, drink, music, and dance. Nochebuena, Christmas Eve, is the night for la misa del gullo, “the rooster's mass," which begins at midnight.

They have no achievements of their own. They've made nothing, created nothing, worked at nothing. They will leave no trace that they ever existed. They have no legacy except for their names, which they did nothing to earn.