Ana Castillo > Quotes

“I ask the impossible: love me forever.
Love me when all desire is gone.
Love me with the single mindedness of a monk.
When the world in its entirety,
and all that you hold sacred advise you
against it: love me still more.
When rage fills you and has no name: love me.
When each step from your door to our job tires you--
love me; and from job to home again, love me, love me.
Love me when you're bored--
when every woman you see is more beautiful than the last,
or more pathetic, love me as you always have:
not as admirer or judge, but with
the compassion you save for yourself
in your solitude.
Love me as you relish your loneliness,
the anticipation of your death,
mysteries of the flesh, as it tears and mends.
Love me as your most treasured childhood memory--
and if there is none to recall--
imagine one, place me there with you.
Love me withered as you loved me new.
Love me as if I were forever--
and I, will make the impossible
a simple act,
by loving you, loving you as I do”
― Ana Castillo, I Ask the Impossible

“Women Are Not Roses

Women have no
beginning
only continual
flows.

Though rivers flow
women are not
rivers.

Women are not
roses
they are not oceans
or stars.

i would like to tell
her this but
i think she
already knows.”
― Ana Castillo, Women Are Not Roses

“There’s something insupportable about being pissed with the one person on this planet that sends your adrenaline flowing to remind you that you’re alive. It’s almost like we’re mad because we’ve been shocked out of our usual comatose state of being by feeling something for someone, for ourselves, for just a moment.”
― Ana Castillo, Loverboys: Stories

“A good lover will do that, see something worthwhile in you that you never knew was there. And when there's something you don't like to see in yourself a good lover won't see it either.”
― Ana Castillo, Peel My Love Like an Onion

“Catch me, as if I have surely been out committing a violation against you, my sin of insisting on existing without you. ”
― Ana Castillo, Loverboys

“What you perceive as "liberal" is my independence to choose what i do, with whom, and when. Moreover, it also means that i may choose not to do it, with anyone, ever.”
― Ana Castillo

“Poverty has its advantages. When you're that poor what would you have that anyone would want?
Except your peace of mind. Your dignity. Your heart.
The important things.”
― Ana Castillo, Peel My Love Like an Onion

“something about giving himself over to a woman was worse than having lunch with the devil...”
― Ana Castillo, So Far from God

“When our mother is seen only as the one-dimensional Mary of modern times, instead of the great dual force of life and death, She is relegated to the same second-class status of most women in the world. She is without desires of Her own, selfless and sexless except for Her womb. She is the cook, the mistress, bearer and caretaker of children and men. Men call upon Her and carry Her love and magic to form a formidable fortress, a team of cannons to protect them against their enemies. But for a long, long time the wars that women have been left to wage on behalf of men, on behalf of the human race, have started much sooner, in the home, in front of the hearth, in the womb. We do what we must to protect and provide for our young our families, our tribes”
― Ana Castillo, Goddess of the Americas / La Diosa de Las Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe

“Between the sun and poverty there was us for a little while.”
― Ana Castillo, Loverboys

“The man you love cooking for you is good for you too.”
― Ana Castillo, Peel My Love Like an Onion

“To all the women and the men who ever loved me just a little.”
― Ana Castillo, Loverboys

“If you wish to heal your sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of others. They are looking to you for guidance, help, courage, strength, understanding, and for assurance. Most of all, they are looking to you for love. He smiled.”
― Ana Castillo, Give It To Me

“Hell = "where we get rid of all the lies told to us. That’s where we go and cry like rain. Mom, hell is where you go to see yourself.”
― Ana Castillo, So Far from God

“Once innocence--an all too-brief state of being, if such a one exists--encounters experience, it is transformed. If that transformation is understood, it becomes knowledge. And if that knowledge is employed, then it becomes wisdom.”
― Ana Castillo, Loverboys

“You say your city the way some Americans say this is their country. You never feel right saying that - my country. For some reason looking Mexican means you can't be American.”
― Ana Castillo, Peel My Love Like an Onion

“Women endure the labor of childbirth and men send themselves to war! But I gave birth to eight children and never once did I cry like I saw some of those men out there before they even fired their first shot! I think it has something to do with the unnaturalness of killing compared to the naturalness of giving birth.”
― Ana Castillo, So Far from God

“The Fool card represented one who walked without fear, aware of the choices she made in the journey of life, life itself being defined as a state of courage and wisdom and not an uncontrollable participation in society, as many people experienced their lives.”
― Ana Castillo, So Far from God

“I don't know why so many of our ideals were stamped out like cigarette butts when we believed in them so furiously. Perhaps we were not furious enough.”
― Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters

“It is beautiful to capture the soul of another being, isn't it? i nod and add, particularly when it has been a special person. We are talking about friendship, that has its own tenets so we are not talking about romantic/love/sex capture of another soul but the true captivation of another's spirit, which happens between people of the same sex sometimes.”
― Ana Castillo, Loverboys

“And if you believe in God, I think She doesn’t work that way either.”
― Ana Castillo, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me

“We said nothing for several minutes. Our minds weighed like ripened fruit on the branch. When one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles.”
― Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters

“I tried to understand how in every journey a man or woman was both hero and anti-hero at varying times. Years”
― Ana Castillo, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me

“But what had really happened, unfortunately, as ideal as it started out to be, was not that they had succeeded in becoming one, but that they had become neither.”
― Ana Castillo, So Far from God

“In what neighborhood—town or city, rural area or village in the country—could I raise a brown boy and believe that no harm could ever come to him, where”
― Ana Castillo, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me

“thought of the countless people in the world who were born to live and die in anonymity, playing out lives no better or worse than anyone else’s and no one noticing. Sometimes we give others who don’t make a big mark in some way a moment in the limelight in fiction. Our novelists’ eyes and ears say to our readers, “Look here, please. Listen. This existence mattered, too.” That”
― Ana Castillo, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi'jo, and Me

“When I was a teenager, we used to cross over to Juárez every weekend. J-Town always had a reputation as a good place to party. It still does. Hey, it's the birthplace of the famous margarita cocktail. Back then, Spanish rock was just starting up and they had some good live bands there on weekends. A carload of us would go drinking and carousing. The worst that would happen was the cops would stop us because we were kids and all hammered.”
― Ana Castillo, The Guardians

“group of any time and place in this world has also been overwritten, erased, represented falsely . . . and both slaughtered and enslaved—by a more powerful group—often using as tactics terror, murder, and starvation.”
― Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma

“Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates”
― Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters

“But wisdom is not only in letters. They knew how to foal their horses, how to sow and grow wheat in winter, how to choose and bend the wood to make their eight-foot-tall bows and hunt for their food, and how to build a house of mud bricks and paint larger than life on its foremost wall an image of one of their guiding icons: either our thousand-hectare winged eagle, or the proud white stag who could be hunted, but ought never be killed; or what my grandfather called “the majesty-horse” who runs like the wind and leaves flames of fire in his hoof prints.”
― Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma