Quotes from Carlos Bulosan

Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words.

You ...see us ...and you think you know us, but our outward guise is more deceptive than our history.

The human heart is bigger than the world.

I lived in a big bunkhouse of thirty farm workers with Leroy, who was a stranger to me in many ways because he was always talking about unions and unity. But he had a way of explaining the meanings of words in utter simplicity, like "work" which he translated into "power," and "power" into "security." I was drawn to him because I felt that he had lived in many places where the courage of men was tested with the cruelest weapons conceivable.

We ...recognize the forces which have been trying to falsify American history—the forces which drive away many Americans to a corner of compromise with those who would distort the ideals of men that died for freedom.

We have been marching for the last one hundred and fifty years. We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. The significant thing is that we march on without turning back. What we want is peace not violence, We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace.

Men who had poetry in their soul come silently into the world and live quietly down the years, and yet when they are gone no moon in the sky is lucid enough to compare with the light they shed when they are among the living.

This is the greatest responsibility of literature: to find in our struggle that which has a future. Literature is a living and growing thing. We must destroy that which is dying, because it does not die by itself.

America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world.

This is also what critical reading of our histories makes possible: we cannot repair what we cannot reconcile; we cannot truly know what we will not truly see.

Why was America so kind and yet so cruel?

I knew that even if I went back to them, after many years of loneliness in another land, I would not be able to pick up where I had left off.

was surprised to know that after eight years in the United States I had only one old blue suit, a cheap suitcase, and three shirts.

Critical reading is a civic act; it's the kind of reading that asks you to be both sharp and vulnerable to both the world of the book and the world the book emerges from; the kind of reading that asks you to bear witness to the things in a book that speak low and deep to some low and deep part of you, which might not always say easy or comforting things.

Critical reading returns you to your life with renewed eyes; it deepens the world for you, inasmuch as it deepens you for the world.

Was it possible that, coming to America with certain illusions of equality, I had slowly succumbed to the hypnotic effects of racial fear?

was a planless life, hopeless, and without direction. I was merely living from day to day: yesterday seemed long ago and tomorrow was too far away.

There is something wrong in our country when a man can take away something that belongs to you and your family.

It was both a religious and an economic war, for in those early days of global vandalism the sword and the cross went together.