Mango Street Quotes

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don't look down at all except to be content to live on hills.

We do this because the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.

I have inherited her name but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.” -The house on Mango Street

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver

Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky.

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.

I have decided not to grow up tamed like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain.” -The House on Mango Street

Butterflies are too few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the best of it.

the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be.

One day I'll own my own house, but I won't forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I'll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumbling. Rats? they'll ask. Bums, I'll say, and I'll be happy.

Not a flat. Not an appartement in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own.

I was terrified. No matter how far I fell, something pulled me back to safety - school and its occasional fascinating gift, dopey, well-meaning men, and books, books, that's where I found her most often, in the intimacies of characters, Ruth and Sylvie in a towboat, Esperanza on Mango Street, Anna K., of course, right before she jumps.

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don’t look down except to be content to live on hills. One day I’ll own my own house but I will not forget who I am or where I came from.” - The House on Mango Street

Моя собствена къща Не квартира. Не задна стая. Не мъжка къща. Не бащина. Къща само моя. С моя собствена веранда и възглавница, мои красиви пурпурни петунии. Мои книги и разкази. Моите две обувки до леглото. Да няма към кого да махам с пръчка. Да няма на кого да чистя. Само къща, тиха като сняг, място, където да отивам, чисто като лист преди стихотворение.

Summer in Honolulu brings the sweet smell of mangoes, guava, and passionfruit, ripe for picking; it arbors the streets with the fiery red umbrellas of poincianta trees and decorates the sidewalks with the pink and white puffs of blossoming monkeypods. Cooling trade winds prevail all summer, bringing what the old Hawaiians called makani 'olu' 'olu--- "fair wind".

When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be.

That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’ ('Left from Dhakeshwari')

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.