Mexico was most powerfully my father's smile and not, as you might otherwise imagine, not language, not pigment.

So many of my friends tell me they’re not religious. I’m like, Of course you’re religious. You watch Oprah Winfrey, don’t you?

But America isn't a country of family values; Mexico is a country of family values. This is a country of people who leave home.

Education is that human process of feeling your body mature, feeding your mind with ideas that it never had before, or information you never had. You simply cannot do that on a computer.

There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn't forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.

But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

Language is a social event.

You don't know Mexico, man. You have trivialized Mexico. You are a fool about Mexico if you think that Mexico is five blocks. That is not Mexico; that is some crude Americanism you have absorbed.

Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

We just had a near-life experience!

The day we serve humanity, as we serve our mothers, we shall find Allah.

I do not like think of them as dead, just alive in another time, they are alive in that time just as we are in this time."- Rose

We can't always win the game

Faith sees the invisible believes the incredible and receives the impossible.

I'm not really an impersonator.

In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

I love to reinvent myself, and that's because I am a very free person. I do what I feel, and I love who I am.

I was an academic and I lost my assignment at Harvard. Meanwhile, [David Petraeus] gets invited to Harvard to become a fellow.