Rigoberto González > Quotes

“Unlike my dead lover, I refuse to/ choose the day I shock the world. There's no/ mystery left in suicide. The challenge is, my love,/ to keep yourself awake/ despite the sleeping pill doses of sickness and/ despair.”
― Rigoberto Gonzalez, OTHER FUGITIVES AND OTHER STRANGERS

“What's a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.”
― Rigoberto Gonzalez, Men Without Bliss (Volume 6)

“Funerals in México are also about drowning sorrow with liquor. The coffee is spiked with tequila”
― Rigoberto González

“I look through the window at the huge valley lit up with different colors. The town is cradled by the dark mountains. From afar it looks as if nothing can get in or out, but judging by the stillness of the view it's as if the citizens have made peace with it and have settled without worry into their insular but protected haven each evening. There are people in the world, I imagine, who are born and die in the same town, maybe even in the same house, or bed. Creatures without migration: have they not lived a life because they have not moved? What of the migratory los González, moving from one place to another and marking every stopping place with angst? What kind of alternative is that? For once my father and I are thinking thinking the same way, sharing a similar yearning for our starting points to have been different, for our final destination to be anything other than the tearful, resentful arrival it is likely to be.”
― Rigoberto Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

“My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.”
― Rigoberto González, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa