Cristina Henriquez Quotes & Sayings

What I didn't understand - what I suddenly realized now - was that if I stopped moving backwards, trying to recapture the past, there might be a future waiting for me, waiting for us, a future that would reveal itself if only I turned around and looked, and that once I did, I could start to move toward it. — Cristina Henriquez

Because a place can do many things against you, and if it's your home or if it was your home at one time, you still love it. That's how it works. — Cristina Henriquez

It was as if, when her father spoke, her mother looked at him and saw a little goldfish, popping open his mouth over and over again but making no sound. And when her mother spoke, her father looked and saw a piranha doing the same thing. — Cristina Henriquez

I didn't want to accept that in order to move forward, I had to walk through it. It was so much easier just to believe there was another path I could take around it and that at the end of that path would be the destination I wanted. It would be easier to want to end up at a lie, instead of the truth. — Cristina Henriquez

Immigration is a system and a set of policies. And immigrants are the people behind those policies and behind that system, and the human stories. — Cristina Henriquez

I wanted her to have the full, long life that every parent promises his or her child by the simple act of bringing that child into the world. — Cristina Henriquez

We stood side by side and looked out at the vastness, the possibility of everything out there. Within the universe, I felt like a speck, but within myself I felt gigantic, the salt air filling my lungs, the roaring of the waves rushing in my ears. — Cristina Henriquez

Often, when people ask me what I read as a young girl, I lie. Or, I should say, I lie by omission. I tell them about my brilliant fourth-grade teacher, Miss Artis, who assigned us 'Johnny Tremain' and 'Where the Red Fern Grows' and 'Tuck Everlasting,' all books that made an impression on me. And people nod in approval. — Cristina Henriquez

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story. — Cristina Henriquez

We would be thousands of miles apart from now on and we would go on with our lives and get older and change and grow, but we would never have to look for each other. Inside each of us, I was pretty sure, was a place for the other. Nothing that had happened and nothing that would ever happen would make that less true. — Cristina Henriquez

I know some people here think we're trying to take over, but we just want to be a part of it. We want to have our stake. This is our home, too. — Cristina Henriquez

The truth was that I didn't know which I was. I wasn't allowed to claim the thing I felt and I didn't feel the thing I was supposed to claim. — Cristina Henriquez

Physical nearness does not necessarily breed intimacy. — Cristina Henriquez

There were torn between wanting to look back and wanting to exist absolutely in the new life they'd created — Cristina Henriquez

My mom is a translator for the school district in Delaware. She'd hear these different stories from working with families there. Those stories stuck with me. — Cristina Henriquez

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word - you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person. — Cristina Henriquez

My dad is from Panama; he came to the U.S. in 1971. He came to study chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. He thought he would go back, and then he met my mom here. I was born and mostly raised in Delaware. — Cristina Henriquez

People do what they have to in this life. We try to get from one end of it to the other with dignity and with honor. We do the best we can. — Cristina Henriquez

You can come back one day. Or I could come there."
"Maybe."
"I could find you."
"Finding is for the things that are lost. You don't need to find me, Mayor. — Cristina Henriquez

I took his razor from the shower floor, bits of his black hair still caked between the blades. I took his toothbrush from the sink counter and sucked on the bristles, trying to find the taste of him, but there was only the flavor of watery mint toothpaste....I pulled the sheets off the bed with the idea that I could gather up the imprint of him and save it. I thought, I can unfurl the sheets on our old bed at home. I can lie in the creases formed by his body. I can sleep with him again. — Cristina Henriquez

Certainly, I read a lot and follow the news. But as a writer, I am not interested in a political story. I am searching for the humanity of the characters. I never set out to write a book about an 'issue.' — Cristina Henriquez

I felt the way I often felt in this country - simultaneously conspicuous and invisible, like an oddity whom everyone noticed but chose to ignore — Cristina Henriquez

We're the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they've been told they're supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we're not that bad, maybe even that we're a lot like them. And who would they hate then? — Cristina Henriquez

But it was only a word - justice. It was only a concept, and it wasn't enough. — Cristina Henriquez

I couldn't swallow. It had to be wrong. We had to be able to rewind. It couldn't be real. It felt so weightless. It felt like an idea, a particle of dust floating around in the air that hadn't landed yet. — Cristina Henriquez

I understood how easily and how quickly things could be snatched away. — Cristina Henriquez

The characters were not unknown because they were illegal or didn't have the documents but because people didn't want to know them. — Cristina Henriquez

Sleep was like wealth, elusive and for other people. — Cristina Henriquez

And I would discover how much of life is defined by what you want to keep and what you are forced to lose. — Cristina Henriquez

Armando's not a pork chop, I say. She shrugs. At least a pork chop would feed you. — Cristina Henriquez

I feel like elements of race and identity and ethnicity are sort of missing in all of literature, not just in women's literature. — Cristina Henriquez

I thought suddenly, what is the meaning of all these things? All these bags and bags I've been packing? We could take everything we have with us. We could take every single thing that every single person in the world has ever had. But not of it would mean anything to me. Because no matter how much I took and no no matter how much I had for the rest of my life, I didn't have him anymore. I could have piled everything from here straight to heaven. None of it was him. — Cristina Henriquez

I saw us from above, from the sky, two flecks of being connected at the edge of the wide, pale ocean, lost to everything but each other. — Cristina Henriquez

I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow. — Cristina Henriquez

I do think all things in moderation. I mean, the thing to me - it actually doesn't bother me very much if people want to read chick lit. But it makes me, you know, sort of disheartened when that's all that people want to read. — Cristina Henriquez

I didn't know until high school that I was interested in writing in any real way. But there was this boy that I had a crush on, and I used to tell him all the time what I felt about him. Finally he gave me a blank journal and said to write it all down - and it didn't take me very long to realize how much I loved writing. — Cristina Henriquez

You shouldn't want to be like everyone else. Then you wouldn't be like you. — Cristina Henriquez

What if God wants us to be happy? What if there's nothing else around the bend? What if all our unhappiness is in the past and from here on out we get an uncomplicated life? Some people get that, you know. Why shouldn't it be us? — Cristina Henriquez

Maybe it's the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing: Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place. — Cristina Henriquez

I'd spent my whole life feeling like that. Like everybody else was onto something that I couldn't seem to find, that I didn't even know existed.I wanted to figure it out, the secret to having the easy life that everyone else seemed to have, where they fit in and were good at everything they tried. Year after year, I waited for it all to fall into place--every September I told myself, This year will be different--but year after year, it was all just the same. — Cristina Henriquez

What kind of place required a man to work all day without being allowed to eat or drink? There had to be rules, didn't there? This was America, after all. — Cristina Henriquez

And then again, maybe people and things are the same as emotions: Even when you can't see them or feel them or be with them, and even when they have died and even before they are born, they still exist somewhere. Far away or close, they're always somewhere. Maybe nothing in the world is truly lost, I think. — Cristina Henriquez