Elaine Castillo > Quotes

“Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“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.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“When artists bemoan the rise of political correctness in our cultural discourse, what they’re really bemoaning is the rise of this unexpected reader. They’re bemoaning the arrival of someone who does not read them the way they expect—often demand—to be read; often someone who has been framed in their work and in their lives as an object, not as a subject.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“[T]he idea that some of us can simply opt out of politics—the idea that politics is something one chooses as a vocation, rather than something we have whether we choose it or not; something that encompasses the inevitable material realities that shape every atom of our lives: where we live, how we work, our relationship to justice—is a fantasy of epic proportions. This kind of nonpolitical storytelling—and the stunted readership it demands—asks us to uphold the lie that certain bodies, certain characters, certain stories, remain depoliticized, neutral, and universal.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“This was--small talk, Hero thought to herself. Though why people called it small, she didn't know. The effort it scraped out of her felt immense, exhausting, like she should have studied for days beforehand just to be ready for it, like she'd need to sleep a dreamless sleep all night just to recover from it.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“When white readers claim to be made uncomfortable—as many I heard from claimed—by the presence of something like untranslated words in fiction, what they’re really saying is: I have always been the expected reader. A reader like this is used to the practice of reading being one that may performatively challenge them, much the way a safari guides a tourist through the “wilderness”—but ultimately always prioritizes their comfort and understanding.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“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.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“You don’t ever really stop having a song. It’s easier to stop having a person than to stop having a song.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“Willful misreading is a violence. To warp the history of a place to serve one vision of the past—and therefore, preserve a specific vision of the present and future—is an obscenity, and yet we live in obscenities like this every day.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“There are mercies, and there are mercies.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“It feels impossibly hard and incalculably stupid to commit to that love, to bear it and be borne by it, but that is what I feel—it is the wellspring that reading leads me to, every time. Loving this world, loving being alive in it, means living up to that world; living up to that love. I can’t say I love this world or living in it if I don’t bother to know it; indeed, be known by it. It’s that mutual promise of knowing that reading holds us in—an inheritance that belongs to us, whether we accept it or not. Whether we read its pages or not. This book remains just one small part of that work: that inheritance, and that love.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“You know what it's like to have a fate; you also know what it's like to escape one.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“Turned out that sublimating one’s “adverse childhood experiences” into being shredded AF did not, in the end, a personality make. She was just someone who lifted; she didn’t have to make the practice an autobiography. Improve your form, eat your protein, keep it moving. That was good enough.”
― Elaine Castillo, Moderation

“How to we hold ourselves accountable -- the root of the word accountable meaning: how do we let the story of ourselves be told? How do we hold ourselves accountable to the things we've received and internalize: the knowledges and the unknowledges, the narratives, silences, and silences, that particularities? To hold ourselves accountable -- to truly hold ourselves, within the depth and vastness of our stories, and remain there, in their thrumming inconsolability-meaning that in our art, we bring to bear not our most powerful, authoritative, intelligent selves, but our most particular, our most precarious, our most dependent selves.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“I’ve very often seen successful people of color framing their experiences of being the only person of color in their classrooms as narratives about struggle, rather than also being narratives about class and power;”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“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.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“So that means you can't remember the last time someone told you take care of yourself in your own language.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“A name had a lifespan like anything else.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“When she turned her head back to look at Rosalyn, she saw that Rosalyn had been studying her for longer than she’d been aware, arms around her knees, the gaze alert and considering. She looked at Hero like she’d looked at her this way a million times before and would do so a million times more; like she was looking at something she was used to but not tired of, something she could trace on paper with her eyes closed.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“I wanted to write about the reading culture I was seeing: the way it instrumentalized the books of writers of color to do the work that white readers should have always been doing themselves; the way our reading culture pats itself on the back for producing “important” and “relevant” stories that often ultimately reduce communities of color to their most traumatic episodes, thus creating a dynamic in which predominantly white American readers expect books by writers of color to “teach” them specific lessons—about historical trauma, farflung wars, their own sins—while the work of predominantly white writers gets to float, palely, in the culture, unnamed, unmarked, universal as oxygen.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“But to simper and shrink and be coy about her birthright was contrary to Girlie’s fundamental nature (kingdom: asshole / phylum: know-it-all / genus: first-generation eldest daughter). She refused to be a tenant of her face, rather than its owner. The heirloom of this beauty had been her mother’s prize possession—sole possession, really—in her impoverished youth back in the Philippines; it was the only form of intergenerational wealth Girlie knew.”
― Elaine Castillo, Moderation

“So then tell me. If Roni came to you now and said, Ate Hero, ako ang sira? Am I sira? Then? Anong sasabihin mo sa kanya? What would you say to her?”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“Our practice taught me most of all to read like a free, mysterious person who was encountering free, mysterious things; to value the profound privacy and irregularity of my own thinking; to spend time in my head and the heads of others, and to see myself shimmer in many worlds—to let many worlds shimmer, lively, in me.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“There are reasons people live in places, Hero said, not realizing she was quoting Teresa until she was doing it. There are consequences, too.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“I realize now that being an unexpected reader has turned out to be the most valuable gift of my intellectual life. The fact that I was an unexpected reader—an interloper, in so many worlds—meant that I was very rarely in any assumed complicity with a writer or the world she created. It meant that I was almost always lost, and always foreign, and always had to make my way through with the only tool I had: continuing to read.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“As for loving America or not loving America, those aren't your problems, either. Your word for love is survival.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart

“That our lives are often incomprehensible to us is not just a human fact, part of the mystery of being alive, the mystery of being in the world—it’s also a fundamental part of colonialism’s legacy.”
― Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now

“But like your average Catholic priest, instead of being fired once his behavior was reported, he was merely transferred to a different department.”
― Elaine Castillo, Moderation

“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 immigrate 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.”
― Elaine Castillo, America Is Not the Heart