I've done everything I've done in America with the limitations I have.

America is White and Black and Latino and Asian. America is mixed. America is immigrants.

Citizenship to me is more than a piece of paper. Citizenship is also about character. I am an American. We're just waiting for our country to recognize it.

For Filipino Americans, it's a battle for recognition, for identity in a culture where, for the mainstream, Asians tend to fade into a monochromatic racialized 'other.'

I am not the 'illegal' you think I am, and immigration is not what you think it is.

When people call me illegal, calling me illegal says more about you than it does about me.

To be in America illegally is actually a civil offense and not a criminal one.

You have to stand for something bigger than yourself.

I have no control over what people call me. The only thing I have control over is my work, and that's really all I can be judged on.

To me, it's just that social media is allowing people to be in charge of their own narratives.

I always felt like I had the word "illegal" tattooed on my forehead.

That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.

Love is the beauty of being.

It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.

Because we were a poor area, the school had a small budget and was unable to teach the second half of the alphabet.

Hee hath not liv'd, that lives not after death.

Nick as in my former boyfriend Nick. Ex-rat, ex-boyfriend, ex-alive if I ever got hold of him Nick.

There is an eternal love between the water drop and the leaf. When you look at them, you can see that they both shine out of happiness.

The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words which are clear; the great truth has great silence.

In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

Science does not have a moral dimension. It is like a knife. If you give it to a surgeon or a murderer, each will use it differently.