Pam Munoz Ryan

“Oh Esperanza!' said Isabel, jumping up and down and clapping.'I think my heart is dancing.”

“I am poor, but I am rich. I have my children, I have a garden with roses, and I have my faith and the memories of those who have gone before me. What more is there?”

“... and her name was Freedom.”

“Rose is not complete without the thorns.”

“How many others were walking around and not even knowing that someone far away cared for them? Imagine all that love floating in the air, waiting to land on someone's life!”

“Our Land is alive, Esperanza," -Esperanza Rising”

“The needle rocked awkwardly and at the end of her beginning rows, Isabel held up her work to show Esperanza. "Mine is all crooked!"Esperanza smiled and reached over and gently pulled the yarn, unraveling the uneven stitches. Then she looked into Isabel's trusting eyes and said, "Do not ever be afraid to start over.”

“Wait for the fruit to fall into your hand.”

“Pablo Neruda's poems tramped through the mud [with the fieldworker]...knocked at the doors of mansions...sat at the table of the baker...The shopkeeper leaned over his counter and read them to his customers...The poems became books that people passed from hand to hand. The books traveled over fences. and bridges. and across borders. soaring from continent to continent. until he had passed thousands of gifts through a hole in the fence to a multitude of people in every corner of the world.”

“Does a metamorphosis begin from the outside in? Or from the inside out?”

“I am poetry,surrounding the dreamer,Ever present,I capture the spirit,enslavethe reluctant pen,and becomethe breathon the writer's only road.”

“What grows [from] the dark soil of disappointment?”

“Which is sharper? The hatchet that cuts down dreams? Or the scythe that clears a path for another?”

“Although he had changed his name, his history came with him, even to his writing. The rhythm of his rain-soaked childhood became a sequence of words. His memories of the understory of the great forest burst into lyrical phrases, as resinous as the sap of a pinecone, as crisp as the shell of a beetle. Sentences grew long, then pulled up short, taking on the tempo of the waves upon the shore, or swayed gently, like the plaintive song of a lone harmonica. His fury became essays that pointed, stabbed, and burned. His convictions played out with the monotonous determination of a printing press. And his affections became poems, as warm and supple as the wool of a well-loved sheep.”

“The words he had written wiggled off the page and escaped from the drawer. The letters stacked themselves, one on top of the other. Their towers reached higher and higher until they stood majestic and tall, surrounding Neftali in a city of promise.”

“As their shoulders touched, the riverboat was no longer earthbound. With only the two of them aboard, it lifted into the sky, navigating a sea of white billows. The boy was the figurehead beneath the bowsprit, eyes searching for the way. Neftali was the paddle wheel, moving them forward as one ancient spirit.”

“We are like the phoenix," said Abuelita. "Rising again, with a new life ahead of us.”

“This is what you learned in college," the narrator tells you early on. "A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the condition of desiring.”

“You never have to get over it you just have to get on with it.”

“There it was again, the good and bad all rolled into a meatball.”

“There is no rose without thorns.”

“Esperanza leaned around the side of the truck. As they rounded a curve, it appeared as if the mountains pulled away from each other, like a curtain opening on stage, revealing the San Joaquin Valley beyond. Flat and spacious, it spread out like a blanket of patchwork fields. Esperanza could see no end to the plots of yellow, brown, and shades of green. The road finally leveled out on the valley floor, and she gazed back at the mountains from where they'd come. They looked like monstrous lions' paws resting at the edge of ridge. ”

“Our Land is alive, Esperanza...This whole valley breathes and lives...He picked up a handful of earth and studied it. Did you know that when you lie down on the land, you can feel it breathe? That you can feel its heart beating.”