Esmeralda Santiago quotes:

I learned you pay for your happiness. That's why I don't expect to be happy all the time. I'd rather be surprised by one moment every so often to remind me that joy is possible, even if I have to pay for it later.

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.

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.

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.

Another train will come. Why rush? Why worry? Why go crazy? Another train will come. And sure enough, another train going my way was pulling into the station. My bad mood evaporated. I entered the car smiling, certain that there would be more missed trains in my life, more closed doors in my face, but there would always be another train rumbling down the tracks in my direction.

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

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

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

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.

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