19 Quotes by Elaine Castillo

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

There are mercies, and there are mercies.

You don't know that you're going to love him. and that you won't be able to differentiate this love for him from your devouring hunger to be recognized.

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.

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.

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.

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

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