"The greatest fool is the man of color who defines his success by the White Man's standard."
~ Xóchitl González
Read all great Xóchitl González quotes below ...
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In the rich tapestry of contemporary literature, Xóchitl González emerges as a luminary whose words resonate with authenticity and cultural depth. Known for her insightful narraStives and poignant storytelling, González has carved a niche for herself in the literary world, captivating readers with her evocative prose and compelling characters.
Born and raised in the vibrant landscapes of Mexico, González's upbringing infused her writing with a deep appreciation for the complexities of human experience, as well as the nuances of cultural identity. Drawing from her own heritage and life experiences, she weaves tales that transcend borders and resonate with readers across the globe.
González's literary journey began with her debut novel, "Anita de Monte Laughs Last," a stirring portrayal of resilience and courage in the face of adversity. Set against the backdrop of rural Mexico, the novel follows the journey of Anita, a young woman determined to defy societal expectations and forge her own path. With its rich imagery and vivid characterizations, "Anita de Monte Laughs Last" struck a chord with readers, earning widespread acclaim for its authenticity and emotional depth.
One of the hallmarks of González's writing is her ability to infuse her narratives with a distinctive voice that reflects the cadence of everyday life. Her prose is marked by a lyrical quality that transports readers to the heart of her stories, immersing them in worlds both familiar and exotic. This unique writing style has garnered praise from critics and readers alike, establishing González as a formidable talent in the literary landscape.
Readers are drawn to González's work for its raw honesty and unflinching portrayal of the human condition. Through her characters, she explores themes of love, loss, identity, and belonging with a depth of insight that resonates long after the final page is turned. Whether she is delving into the complexities of family dynamics or the challenges of cultural assimilation, González approaches her subjects with empathy and compassion, inviting readers to see the world through fresh eyes.
While "Anita de Monte Laughs Last" remains one of González's most celebrated works, she has also received acclaim for her short stories and essays, which have been featured in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Her ability to capture the essence of a moment in a few short pages has earned her a devoted following among fans of short fiction.
In addition to her literary accomplishments, González has also been recognized for her contributions to the cultural landscape. She has received prestigious awards and fellowships, including the [insert specific awards/fellowships here], which have helped to elevate her profile and bring attention to her work.
For those who have yet to discover the magic of Xóchitl González's writing, her books offer a window into a world filled with beauty, passion, and profound insight. Whether you are drawn to her evocative prose or her richly drawn characters, there is something in González's work for every reader to savor and enjoy.
Looking ahead, fans of Xóchitl González can anticipate the release of her highly anticipated new novel, [insert title here], slated to hit shelves in the coming months. With its promise of engaging storytelling and thought-provoking themes, the novel is sure to captivate readers and further solidify González's reputation as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature. As she continues to explore the depths of the human experience, Xóchitl González remains a writer to watch, her words a testament to the power of storytelling to transcend boundaries and touch hearts.
Xóchitl González Best Quotes
“You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Benevolent colonialism is still colonialism.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“The greatest fool is the man of color who defines his success by the White Man's standard”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Of course, the problem is that we don’t live in a world just of women. Not only do men exist, but we are drawn to them and, for complex reasons, they do not treasure time in the same way that we do. It may have to do with an inability to face mortality, or needs of ego, or maybe it simply has to do with the fact that they don’t hear the ticking of a biological clock. What I can say with certainty is that a man has no problem wasting time, especially that of a woman. And they manage to do so in such insidious ways we often don’t notice that it’s happening until it’s too late.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“It’s dangerous at your young age to be surrounded by people who don’t value who you are. Who don’t understand you. A child can become lost.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“In a woman's world, time is the most precious commodity. and we don't have it to waste.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“A man has no problem wasting time, especially that of a woman. And they manage to do so in such insidious ways we often don't notice that it's happening until it's too late.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“In Olga’s heart there was a pin-sized hole of infinite depth that made every day slightly more painful than it needed to be. She thought of it, this hole, as a birth defect. The space where, in a normal heart, a mother’s love was meant to be.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“It's a myth about motherhood, Olga felt, that the time in utero imbues mothers with a lifelong understanding of their children. Yes, they know their essences, this she didn't doubt, but mothers are still humans who eventually form their own ideas of both who their kids are and who they think they should be. Inevitably there were disparities.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming
tags: motherhood“They were nice people, generally, but their litany of problems, real or imagined, never waned. Nor did their sense of urgency around getting these problems resolved, their allergy to even a moment’s discomfort quite severe.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Debt is one of The Man’s great tools for keeping people of color oppressed.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Because I understand all the problems, I just fundamentally don’t believe we can fix them. However, I fully support those on the bottom taking as much advantage of the top as humanly possible.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Never remembering that when they ask for your time it's always before and after they accomplished what they wanted to do with their day.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Girl, I don’t need to be Puerto Rican to want to help out. That’s the problem right now. People think they’re only responsible for people exactly like them. I don’t feel that way. They left my people to die after Katrina. It’s the same. Like I said, it’s on us to help each other.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Prieto had never given much thought to The Man. The notion of one mythical, monolithic, rich, powerful White Man puppeteering the lives of people of color to keep them dancing in service of his larger plan seemed far too simplistic to serve the complex issue of systemic oppression very well.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“... if you did nothing for the rest of your life of any note, you'd be more than enough.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“She wanted to know the size and shape of the hole that had been left in his heart that required so many objects to fill it.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“How much that hurt. How much, she and her brother realized, they had internalized this, becoming these people who needed to be seen in order to exist.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I won’t try to convince you that this guy isn’t worthy of you. I remember being young and thinking I understood love, too. But I do have to ask questions, in the hopes that you will ask them of yourself. What are his bigger ambitions for himself? When was the last time he asked about yours? Besides your looks, does he value your mind? Does he ask your opinions in public? Does he support your curiosities in a meaningful way? What is his vision for you as a wife and a mother? What is his vision for himself as a husband and a father? Does he ask you if you want to have kids or does he just assume? Does he know that money can purchase things but not joy?”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Their nation—America—was restless after the collapse of slavery. White supremacists were desperate for new Brown bodies to dominate; the capitalists salivated for new lands to exploit. And so began their destruction of Puerto Rico.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“There were, inevitably, children’s clothing stores, furniture shops still offering bedroom sets by layaway, and dollar stores whose awnings teemed with suspended inflatable dolls, beach chairs, laundry carts, and other impulse purchases a mom might make on a Saturday afternoon, exhausted by errand running with her kids. There was the sneaker store where Olga used to buy her cute kicks, the fruit store Prieto had worked at in high school, the little storefront that sold the kind of old-lady bras Abuelita used to wear. On the sidewalks, the Mexican women began to set up their snack stands. Mango with lime and chili on this corner, tamales on that. Until the Mexicans had come to Sunset Park, Olga had never tried any of this food, and now she always tried to leave a little room to grab a snack on her way home. Despite the relatively early hour, most of the shops were open, music blasting into the streets, granting the avenue the aura of a party. In a few more hours, cars with their stereos pumping, teens with boom boxes en route to the neighborhood’s public pool, and laughing children darting in front of their mothers would add to the cacophony that Olga had grown to think of as the sound of a Saturday.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Women are born with barometers in our belly that make us more sensitive to the climate around us and because we're so often on the lowers rung of any ladder, we're naturally inclined to look out for the least among us.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Who wouldn’t want to claim an identity that allows them to pay zero taxes on capital gains, interests, or dividends? Puerto Rico represents a chance to live the American dream as it was intended: the freedom to reach our full potential without having to support a welfare state.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“you’re saving me—all of us—from being washed away. You’ve put down little anchors, even if it’s just a few. Even if we’re just little dinghies floating in this big sea. I didn’t think I could love you more.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Puerto Rico is America, you fucking dummies! And I’m from fucking Brooklyn! Jesus!” she screamed at the TV.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“businesses lost after the recession, after Sandy, their retail corpses replaced by hotels and big box stores. The creep of wealth and whiteness that had slowly, steadily been frog boiling her hometown, pushing out and scattering families like her own.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Weak, like your father,” she said, shaking her head. “I had always worried that you got this from him. …” “Got what? Being gay? Disease? What the fuck are you talking about?” She looked impatient with him. “No, Prieto, your weakness of character. Your inability to sublimate your personal satisfactions in order to live your full potential.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Indeed, he even gave her odious brother a moment of reconsideration. Such a remarkable rise. It made him feel oddly patriotic; the American dream, still possible.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“It was a brutal exercise, wrestling with objective reality. To see how their mother had manipulated their lives and their feelings. To see how she attempted to subtly poison the way they saw their aunts and uncles, their cousins, their father, and even, in some instances, their grandmother. All the people who had loved them in her absence.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I know you are.” And he kissed her softly. “But, there’s another thing. Olga, you can’t be washing money for these Russian cats. It’s all blinis and vodka shots until you end up dead in Little Odessa, and I love you too much to risk that happening. If you need money until you figure out what you want to do next, please let me help you.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Her fear of her own imperfections were softened by his acceptance of his own.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“No women like photos like that. We’re just told that we’re supposed to by a lazy patriarchal culture that assumes that women must like the inverse of what men like. Men like topless boob pics, ergo, women must love bare chest shots … it’s just lazy.” He”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“She noted how much she felt herself in a costume for a life she could never have.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I'd always thought my brother's goodness defined him but what if it's actually his fear? If protecting his image eclipses his impulse to do good? What would that mean about who my brother is?”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“It's about not chasing an external ideal, not trying to fit someone else's vision for you and instead building with the community of people who simply accept you as you are.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Mothering and birding a child are the same. Children don't ask to be born. They don't owe anybody anything. This is one area your mother and I never saw eye to eye on, frankly. I'm down for her cause -- no American can truly be free while we still have colonies. If your rights are less because you're born in one place, not another, how meaningful are those rights in the first place? But, and this is a big but, that's why you should talk to this Richard dude, not because you owe your mother anything. If you've got a good thing going on and this business opens a whole can of worms... well, all I'm saying is, it's okay to choose yourself.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“The pleasure of being lusted for was amplified by the consciousness that she might be the only thing he’d ever coveted that couldn’t be his.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“He genuinely wants to fix it. For people like us. And he’s not perfect—he’s a little naïve, he’s a people pleaser—but I also know we’re better off that it’s him in office versus some other crooked motherfucker.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Olga did not see this as a theft as much as an equalization of resources:”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Her family should have to wipe their mouths with $3 polyester rags because Tío JoJo’s teachers were too fucking lazy to ask why he struggled with reading?”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“We are not sending her the hundred or so napkins that will sit in a box in the back of the kitchen, unused, for the rest of the night. Not only is that not what she asked for,”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Started with the crack, then back to dope. He lost the strength to say no to temptations. And now, because of this weakness, he is being eaten by this disease. For years while this went on, I sacrificed my own goals and priorities to try and salvage his. In truth, I should have left right away. I didn’t fully comprehend, back then, that the only person who can chart your course is you. No individual can save another, certainly not anyone who doesn’t want to be saved.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“it’s a tale for you to learn from. It’s about not chasing an external ideal, not trying to fit someone else’s vision for you and instead building with the community of people who simply accept you as you are.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“The shit of the whole thing is we traded a corrupt democracy for an inept autocracy,”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Practicalities, even as mundane as relieving one's bladder, have a way of upending indulgences carried on for too long.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“The price of Imperialism is lives. —JUAN GONZÁLEZ”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I am myself, plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself. —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Olga did not see this as a theft as much as an equalization of resources: Mrs. Henderson had aggressively accumulated too much of something while her family had acutely too little. At the Henderson wedding, despite all the time and energy spent discussing, procuring, pleating, and angling these napkins, they would go unnoticed. But at Mabel’s, like a black Chanel suit in a sea of knockoff Hervé Léger bandage dresses, they would stop people in their tracks. “¡Qué elegante!” she could hear her Titi Lola saying. She could picture her Tío Richie holding two of them over his chest and saying, “Hey, how many do you think I’d need to make a guayabera?” There would be countless cousins uttering, simply, “Classy,” as they thumbed the fabric between their fingers. This was the least Olga could do, she felt. Why shouldn’t her family get to know the feeling of imported Belgian flax against their laps? Because”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“My generation isn’t like you kids. You want everyone to talk all about every bit of themselves all the time. On the Facebook. So stupid.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Hipsters and their ironically named bars had begun to creep further south. First the sailor-themed bar, The Merman, opened on Twenty-first Street, then Gravediggers—right across from the Greenwood Cemetery on Twenty-sixth. Then Twenty-seventh Street, then Thirtieth. Always luring the same patron: skinny, pale kids with NPR tote bags, intricate line tattoos visible under their frilly, ironic sundresses or Bernie Sanders T-shirts with the sleeves cut off.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Mabel’s father was a janitor? Because that was the job he could get after he dropped out of high school? Because he dropped out mainly because he was dyslexic? A disorder that the family only learned of, mind you, when one of his grandchildren was diagnosed with it at school and Tío JoJo, to comfort the child, said, “It’s okay, mijo, I’ve seen the letters backwards my whole life, and I’ve been okay.” Her family should have to wipe their mouths with $3 polyester rags because Tío JoJo’s teachers were too fucking lazy to ask why he struggled with reading? Because no one blinked at another dumb Puerto Rican dropping out of a shitty public high school? Fuck that.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“You know, Olga, you’re not the only one with abandonment issues. You know that, right? My pops bounced, too. I’d have thought you of all people would understand how fucked up it feels. To be waiting by the phone.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Who was this naked hoarder?”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I bet you are being fawned over at school for the rare “achievement” of being admitted to an Ivy League college. That mi familia is so proud, so bowled over by the famous white names and faces that have gone there before you. So pleased that a place built on the back of slaves, funded by the sheep-like descendants of slave owners, run via nepotism towards advancing more of those descendants, took in someone like you. As if, somehow, you breaking into that system, your intelligence being affirmed by this institution, means that they, too, have accomplished something”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“The most painful wounds,” Papi used to say, “are those inflicted by our own kind.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“the myth of an American meritocracy,”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Debt is one of The Man’s great tools for keeping people of color oppressed”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“You must remember, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Olga nodded. She felt her blood pressure rising. “He was on all my biggest fall events,” Carol lamented with a sigh. “He had so much to live for.” Olga said with a smile, “Yes, Carol. If only Jan had reached out before he took his life, you could have reminded him what an inconvenience his death would be for New York society. Surely that would have given him something to live for.” She excused herself without waiting for a response, beelined out the door and onto the street where she found a taxi, and directed it to her local dive bar.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“yet there was no one with actual power whose job was to fight for them. No one to represent them and demand action. On a good day, Prieto didn’t trust this administration not to fuck anyone who wasn’t a part of their “base.” He could only imagine the cruel neglect they would subject upon an entire island of disenfranchised Brown and Black people. It was playing out before his very eyes. He wanted to stay to help, yes, but also so that no one could deny what he saw. No one could “spin” it and say the footage was”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“How impossible their mother had made it to tell her who they really were and how she had made it impossible because she found their inner selves insignificant.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“She began, gradually at first, to find not only her actual day-to-day work tedious and stupid, but also the entire project of her life. Around this time Olga noticed that her mother’s notes no longer filled her, even for a moment, with smug satisfaction.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“These deaths will be blood on this president’s hands, this administration’s hands. They can try and blame the Puerto Rican debt; they can blame their lackey—the governor down there—but he’s just a figurehead. At the end of the day, this was not an earthquake, it was a hurricane. A hurricane that the government knew was coming for a whole week and did nothing to prepare for.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“they, together, had just set Latinx identity in America back to pre–Ricky Ricardo levels. Again, Olga heard her father’s voice. Pendeja.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“LUCKILY FOR OLGA, white America was nearly as upset over Spice It Up as she had been,”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Mr. President, I hope that the ghosts of every Puerto Rican who died at your hands in this catastrophe haunt your dreams each night, dancing an all-night salsa party in your twisted mind.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“want to do this with you. For real. But I told you what I needed, and that was for you to not disappear. I trusted you and you broke that trust, and I know it wasn’t intentional. It’s your very fucked-up coping mechanism. But I think for this to work, we can’t accept that as a way to deal with things. You need a new coping mechanism”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Focus group participants who reported enjoying the show during the screening were calling back hours, even days later to say that they had been haunted—“haunted” was the word—by the prospect of “someone like Olga” coming in and bossing their family around. In coastal suburban enclaves, the show fared even worse. One focus group participant said Olga represented a new “threat” to “normal women.” “It’s bad enough,” this woman was quoted as saying, “that we need to fear au pairs and yoga instructors. Now we need to worry about ‘spicy’ wedding planners?”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Olga wrote back to say that she always knew she was one of the 53 percent of white ladies who had put this moron in the White House, so she hoped the ghosts of dead Puerto Ricans danced in her head at night, too. But, other than that one incident, Olga had taken a very conciliatory tack.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I knew no one would understand," [Blanca] said, "But to be honest, no one's ever really understood. My whole life I felt my skin was too small for what I knew was possible for me. I spent years fighting my way off of this narrow path laid out for me—as a woman, as a Boricua. And yet, despite all my efforts, there I was. In exactly the life I'd been so desperate to avoid. I felt I was choking in Brooklyn, choking trying to compress myself into that life. I knew what everyone would think. What kind of woman leaves her family? But to me, what I did was an act of love. For what I believed I could do here, in Puerto Rico, but also for myself.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“wasn’t quite code-switching so much as he managed, miraculously, to speak several languages simultaneously, creating a linguistic creole of hip-hop, academia, contemporary slang, and high-level policy points that made Olga marvel.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I suppose though," Matteo offered, "most of us in New York live double lives, with a secret of some sort living behind closed doors."
Really? What's your secret?
I already told you. I'm a hoarder.
She giggled.
So, what's your secret? Matteo asked.
"I'm a terrible person.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming
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“And so, I will wait. To see if you will be my son of the Noble Land or just a son of a bitch.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming
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“[Reggie], Prieto continued, ""I've got to ask, what are you doing here? You have so much going on. Legit shit. Have you really thought this through? What happens on the day revolution actually comes? Because my mom is out for blood and I'm not sure you're that kind of dude. Not really. You just play him of TV. You're hitching your wagon to my mother, and my mother does not give a f***k about you or all you stand to lose.”"
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“The women of the Upper East Side, Dallas, Palm Beach, and even Silicon Valley all felt just a bit better about their choice in party planner knowing that they could tell the ladies at SoulCycle or Pilates that yes, the wedding is overwhelming, but at least they have that fabulous girl from Good Morning, Later helping them out, so things are under control. Those kinds of bragging rights carried a premium. In the aftermath of the Spice It Up debacle, Olga realized that she’d allowed herself to become distracted from the true American dream—accumulating money—by its phantom cousin, accumulating fame. She would never make that mistake again.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“When Reggie had been dating Olga, their mother had sent Prieto countless letters attempting to enlist him in the cause of breaking them up; now he seemed to be, at least in part, financing her commune? Or was it a cult?”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“And so, Olga, you must see yourself and my absence not as one little girl missing her mother, but as a brave young woman who knows that in a world of oppression, achieving liberation will require sacrifice. You can't stay in your room and cry. You can't keep Abuelita up at night with your tears. You have to keep your head held high, you have to be strong. Like the revolutionary we raised you to be.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“She was, in that environment, to those college boys, like a hanger, or a price tag, or the machine that swiped the black American Express cards. Not an object to be desired, but a tool to facilitate the acquisition of desirable things.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I’ve recruited more brilliant puertorriqueños to our movement this year than in any other single year. PROMESA highlighted the neocolonialism that this pendejo governor and his father before him have tried to gloss over while they line their pockets with the Yanquis’ money.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors. Pa’lante,”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Olga had never had many friends, in part because she loved to spend time with Abuelita, their minds so much alike. Her mother was so black-and-white—rigid with her principles. Her father, a dreamer, lost in impossible ideals. But to Olga, her grandmother was a hustler who actually got things done. She understood the dance, which they did together, often. Both literally, as Abuelita, glamorous and towering in her heels, loved to dance with young Olga, and also figuratively. With her parents absent for such critical years of her life, Abuelita was never afraid to bend the truth, make someone dead of another person missing, in order to procure special tutoring, or a scholarship, or whatever her grandchildren needed. The truth, Abuelita would say, is so much harder to believe than our lie, no? And it's not like we have bad intentions, si? Yes! Olga would agree. She loved it all. The high heels, the prayer, the laissez-faire relationship with rules and regulations. Whether born that way or formed into shape from necessity, the two women mirrored each other.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Again and again, Olga returned to church after that, hopeful that this visit would be the moment when she was healed. That on this occasion, the anger that so often filled her would be replaced by grace.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“He sighed and with his breath he released something he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in: a fantasy. Some mythic, emotional reunion with a version of his mother that had lived, tucked deep in his imagination.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“am myself, plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself. —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET The price of Imperialism is lives. —JUAN GONZÁLEZ”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Yeah, my dad picked [ the name Olga]. Wanted to make me 'ambitious.' But my mother worried that I would take after the Olga from Puerto Rican Obituary. That Olga was ashamed of her identity and died dreaming of money and being anything other than herself.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“You aren’t fucking sorry, Olga,” he said. It was anger. He could feel it. “You’re a manipulative cunt and you knew what I would think you wanted when you reached out to me.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I need to know that you’re gonna call your friend at the FBI off. Please tell me you aren’t such a sellout you’d sacrifice the good work that we’re doing for our people just because you don’t feel loved by your mommy.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“I’ve got to ask, what are you doing here? You have so much going on. Legit shit. Have you really thought this through? What happens on the day revolution actually comes? Because my mom is out for blood and I’m not sure you’re that kind of dude. Not really. You just play him on TV. You’re hitching your wagon to my mother, and my mother does not give a fuck about you or all you stand to lose.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“If being a single woman made you gay,” Olga would say, “then make me Grand Marshall of the Pride Parade.”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming“Why do you defend her!? ¡Coño! She left you! She never called until she needed something—and then that something is fucking batshit crazy. You made a whole life without her and she’s literally been telling you that you aren’t shit for years, but you defend her!”
― Xóchitl González, Olga Dies Dreaming