Esmeralda Santiago Quotes

Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.

if you don't exist in the arts of a culture, you're invisible. The arts are what express the soul of who we are and that expresses our humanity.

For me, the person I was becoming when we left was erased, and another one was created.

How can you know what you're capable of if you don't embrace the unkown?

People think [immigration] is only about the dollar, but it's so much more complex. This is a place where you can reinvent yourself. I don't know that you can do that anywhere else.

What doesn't kill you, makes you fat.

We're always going to have prejudices ... I don't think we can change society. You can only change individual by individual. And you can change yourself.

In the twenty-one years I lived with my mother, we moved at least twenty times.

I dressed to their murmurs in the other room, their voices soft but strained, and I wondered if men ever talked like this, if their sorrows ever spilled into these secret cadences.

I would just as soon remain jamona than shed that many tears over a man.