Olga Dies Dreaming Quotes

You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.

Benevolent colonialism is still colonialism.

The greatest fool is the man of color who defines his success by the White Man's standard

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.

Debt is one of The Man’s great tools for keeping people of color oppressed.

In a woman's world, time is the most precious commodity. and we don't have it to waste.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

... if you did nothing for the rest of your life of any note, you'd be more than enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Puerto Rico is America, you fucking dummies! And I’m from fucking Brooklyn! Jesus!” she screamed at the TV.

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.

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.

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.

She noted how much she felt herself in a costume for a life she could never have.

Have you forgotten that when money is what centers someone's soul, that soul is hollow?

Borikén, the original name of the island from which you and I descend, means Land of the Noble Lord. This name was given by the Taíno, the native people.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Oreo cookie invented, the Titanic sinks, Spanish flu, Prohibition, women granted the right to vote, Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic, penicillin invented, stock market crashes, the Depression, Amelia Earhart, the atom is split, Prohibition ends, Golden Gate Bridge is built, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Korean War, Disneyland, Rosa Parks, Laika the dog is shot into space, hula hoops, birth control pill invented, Bay of Pigs, Marilyn Monroe dies, JFK killed, MLK has a dream, Vietnam War, Star Trek, MLK killed, RFK killed, Woodstock, the Beatles (George, Ringo, John, and Paul) break up, Watergate, the Vietnam War ends, Nixon resigns, Earth Day, Fiddler on the Roof, Olga Korbut, Patty Hearst, Transcendental Meditation, the ERA, The Six Million Dollar Man. "Bloody hell," I said when she was done. "I know. It must be a lot to take in." "It's unfathomable. A Brit named his son Ringo Starr?" She looked pleasantly surprised: she'd thought I had no sense of humor. "Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.

You must remember, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors.

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

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.

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.

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.

the worms came from Karen Price, it was only because she was serving as proxy for Prieto’s own mother. To let him know she saw him as a traitor.

Your own dreams are hardly formed, and I worry that with a man like that—a man who seems so lost himself—you’ll spend your whole life supporting his ideas and his career and his children.

These bourgeois institutions that do nothing but reaffirm that in a capitalist society there are those who are anointed to rule and those born to serve. Do not confuse admission for a chance at power. This kind of college has no place for you, even if they offered you one of their precious “affirmative action” spots. They do not want to teach your people’s history; they don’t want to read your people’s

racist society, bringing social and environmental justice to inner-city minorities, and, of course, liberating Puerto Rico. And now, you, their daughter, seem to have found a way to make a living—a living that, despite the shoddy construction of your apartment building, seems pretty lucrative, if I may be so observant, but, if I may further observe, is a living reliant upon embracing the very people and values that your parents were trying to topple less than a generation before. So, my question is, how do your parents feel about that?

Julio got it from Jared’s, bitch, what did you get? That’s right, nothing.

Because no one blinked at another dumb Puerto Rican dropping out of a shitty public high school? Fuck that.

And so, I will wait. To see if you will be my son of the Noble Land or just a son of a bitch.

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.

The keeping of this secret prevented me from having closer ties with my daughter, my sister, my community. It kept me from earnestly pursuing love. So, when I was recently diagnosed with HIV, I realized I could not keep my orientation or my status secret any longer. There was too much at risk.

They could come to him with their problems. He wore the suit not because he wanted to look like a politician, but because he wanted them to see that he took them seriously.

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.

I am myself, plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

The rational part of him that looked back on it, the part that was now a father himself recognized that disappointments -- large or small -- don't eradicate that kind of love.

You must remember, mijo, even people who were once your sails can become your anchors. Pa’lante,

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?” “What it would mean, Olga,” and this Matteo said with a wry smile, “is that your brother is just like every other politician.” “Well … fuck,” Olga said, and swigged her beer.

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

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.

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.

Our nation born, some might say, from the pain of colonialism. I, however, choose to see our people as birthed from the Land of the Noble Lord.

No matter where I’ve traveled, women, when given space, have excelled at organizing and improving their communities. We’re born with barometers in our belly that make us more sensitive to the climate around us and, because we’re so often on the lowest rung of any ladder, we’re naturally inclined to look out for the least among us. Since we’re also burdened by domestic tasks, we’re forced to be more efficient. In a woman’s world, time is the most precious commodity, and we don’t have it to waste.

From the day she went into Manhattan to begin high school she’d been navigating worlds that felt foreign to her: her language, her values, her way of seeing people and the world always requiring explanation and context.

Pa'alante," Prieto called out. "Siempre pa'lante," the man called back. Keep going. Always keep going.

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

the Puerto Rican flag, the coquí, Lolita Lebrón, Héctor Lavoe, and Big Pun, all at once. Underneath it said #respecttheanscestors and,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

hear from my friends that you are on a reality television show now working for rich white people. Planning parties for them. Like a secretary. Or, maybe worse, a maid! Someone sent me the tape and I almost don’t want to watch. Is this a business? Is this a job? Or are you trying to be famous? Because the world needs to see another Latina girl sweeping the dust from white people’s feet? I’m struggling to understand how this happened and what about this path was appealing to you.

You must be careful not to let anyone, including your family—even your own dying father—distract you from your bigger ambitions for yourself. You are a person of great potential, already on your path. Don’t make yourself smaller for anybody.

You act like a bitch all the time, but you have this heart of gold, Olga. Of course I’m gonna pay his tuition, but it’s not a bad thing to let him work for it a bit, is it?

Practicalities, even as mundane as relieving one's bladder, have a way of upending indulgences carried on for too long.

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.

(Were they hipsters, even? Olga thought. Weren’t these just yuppies by another name? For surely, with such ubiquity of style, they were no longer technically hip.)

She shouldn’t be irritated at all, she counseled herself, and instead laugh her way to the bank.

She looked back for visual confirmation that she had, indeed, just fucked a guy who wore socks and sandals. In the summer. Pg.29

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.

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.

The room, she saw now, was more battlefield than funeral parlor.

The shit of the whole thing is we traded a corrupt democracy for an inept autocracy,

But, I am cynical. 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.

The sun’s last light so strong, it gilded the weeds that had popped up between the cracks.

the myth of an American meritocracy,

It’s a myth about motherhood… the time in utero imbues mothers with a lifelong understanding of their children… 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… it was hard to not let that disparity turn into a feeling of deficiency.

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.

[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.

Prieto thought about how in no point in his life, could he recall anyone in his family ever explicitly saying anything bad about gay people. Maybe the occasional observation about how a neighbor's son walked. Or speculation about a certain distant cousin who was still a bachelor.

If they had an inkling, they certainly did not try to shame him into a closet. Not explicitly, no. He kept himself there. Not because he was told his feelings were wrong, but because he understood they were not exactly right. That was made clear to him in ways big and small, for

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.