Quotes from Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them tostop fighting?

The reason I want to remember this is because I know we'll never be able to do it again.

When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals.

I instinctively decided that I would prove that I wasn't different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward I lived with this double impulse:the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be accepted

Who do you want to win this war?' 'I am interested to know where you will be going when you leave.' 'Mr. Wakatsuki, if I have repeat each one of these questions we will be here forever. Who do you want...?' 'When your mother and your father are having a fight, do you want them to kill each other? Or do you just want them to stop fighting?

From that day on, pay of me yearned to be invisible. In a way, nothing would have been nicer than for no one to see me. Although I could not have defined it at the Tom me, I felt if attention were drawn to me, people would see what this girl had first responded to. They wouldn't see me, the would see the slanted - eye face, the Oriental.

You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.

That continuous, unnamed ache I had been living with was precise and definable now. Call it the foretaste of being hated. I knew ahead of time that if someone looked at me with hate, I would have to allow it, to swallow it, because something in me, something about me deserved it.

If anything made that country habitable it was the mountains themselves, purple when the sun dropped and so sharply etched in the morning light the granite dazzled almost more than the bright snow lacing it. The nearest peaks rose ten thousand feet higher than the valley floor, with Whitney, the highest, just off to the south. They were important for all of us, but especially for the Issei. Whitney reminded Papa of Fujiyama, that is, it gave him the same kind of spiritual sustenance.

It's a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue. People are issued out.

It had taken me twenty-five years to reach the point where I could talk openly about Manzanar

Writing it has been a way of coming to terms with the impact these years have had on my entire life.

He had become a man without a country. The land of his birth was at war with America; yet after thirty-five years here he was still prevented by law from becoming an American citizen. He was suddenly a man with no rights who looked exactly like the enemy.

Now she wanted for me the same thing I thought I wanted. Acceptance, in her eyes, was simply another means for survival.

The times I thought I had dreamed it were one way of getting rid of it, part of wanting to lose it, part of what you might call a whole Manzanar mentality I had lived with for twenty-five years. Much more than a remembered place, it had become a state of mind. Now, having seen it, I no longer wanted to lose it or to have those years erased. Having found it, I could say what you can only say when you've truly come to know a place: Farewell