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Famous Elaine Castillo Quotes

“Paz smiled, and answered the way Hero would learn she always answered: rather than lying, or even dodging the question, she preferred to speak the supposedly shameful truth as if it were something to be proud of. Of course not, she said, her voice sweet and direct. We're too poor to have anything like a car. She made it sound like it was desirable not to have a car, ridiculous to even want one. Hero had been impressed, not least of all because even she'd gotten in the habit of leaving a room whenever Tita Ticay entered it, terrified of her venomous tongue, her keen eyes, the ease with which she spotted weakness, and the please with which she toyed with it.”

HonestyGossipSocial ClassFilipino Culture
Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“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.”

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Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“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.”

ReadingDiversity
Book:How to Read Now
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“Paz was a few years older than her; looked younger. Hero saw her alone on the veranda, in a black dress patterned with what looked like large sampaguita vines. Her center-parted hair reached just to the top of her ass; it was the most expensive-looking thing about her. She appeared to understand that beauty, at least, was also a kind of wealth.”

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Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“One day one of the girls, Felt, says to the group: You know how they say rich people have red heels? You have, in fact, always heard this growing up: that poor people have dusty, gray heels, and rich people have smooth, moisturized heels, red with health. You have a tendency to hide your feet, even though you've always rubbed cream into them religiously so they won't look like your mother's heels, desert-cracked. Well, I have a trick, Fely says, showing all of you her smooth, impossibly red heels. You just put merthiolate on it! Not iodine, that makes it orange. Merthiolate is the secret! After that, all of you take to staining your heels with the liquid antiseptic. From then on, you love wearing slingbacks, mules, cropped trousers. Years later, even as an adult nurse in California, sometimes you'll still put merthiolate on your heels.”

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Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“[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.”

ReadingCritical Reading
Book:How to Read Now
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“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.”

ReadingDiversity And Inclusion
Book:How to Read Now
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“Hero was touched by the small gesture of courtesy, at first only minutely, and then, for no reason at all, deeply and wholly. It was possible she was about to cry, here in this kitchen, for the first time since she'd arrived in America. To prevent that from happening, she stuffed her mouth with an entire quarter of the pizza, then huffed and gasped as the molten bite burned her tongue.”

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Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“Hero had the sense that Pol's Ilocano was stuck in time, that he only wanted to speak it with the people he'd always spoken it to, but even when Hero and Pol spoke in Ilocano with each other in California, there was a playacting stiffness in their voices that hadn't been there back in Vigan, when Hero used to hang on every word.”

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Book:America Is Not the Heart
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“Hero opened her mouth, still unsure of whether to use English or Tagalog when talking to Paz. Paz had a habit of speaking to Roni in a mixture of English, Tagalog, and Pangasinan. It felt like Roni didn't really know the difference between Tagalog and Pangasinan, and moved between the two interchangeably as if they were one language. Nobody had told her otherwise, Hero supposed. But for Hero, listening to the mixture was like listening to a radio whose transmission would occasionally short out; she'd get half a sentence, then nothing -- eventually the intelligible parts would start back up, but she'd already lost her place in the conversation. But when Pol would come in, they'd switch to English, and like adjusting a dial to get a sharper signal, Hero would be able to tune in again.”

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Book:America Is Not the Heart
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