America Is Not the Heart
Elaine Castillo
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave”
“You've been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you're hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.”
“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.”
“This was--small talk, Hero thought to herself. Though why people called it small, she didn't know. The effort it scraped out of her felt immense, exhausting, like she should have studied for days beforehand just to be ready for it, like she'd need to sleep a dreamless sleep all night just to recover from it.”
“There are mercies, and there are mercies.”
“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.”
“A name had a lifespan like anything else.”
“You know what it's like to have a fate; you also know what it's like to escape one.”
“You don’t ever really stop having a song. It’s easier to stop having a person than to stop having a song.”
“When she turned her head back to look at Rosalyn, she saw that Rosalyn had been studying her for longer than she’d been aware, arms around her knees, the gaze alert and considering. She looked at Hero like she’d looked at her this way a million times before and would do so a million times more; like she was looking at something she was used to but not tired of, something she could trace on paper with her eyes closed.”
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Book Keywords:
family-relationships, meaning, place, filipino-authors, historical, trauma, names, music, small-talk, language, personhood, self-love, poverty, fate, immigrants, song, history, foreignness, naming, mercy, romance
