How to Love a Country Quotes

“to know a country takes all we know of love:

some days better than others, but never easy to keep our promise every morning of every year, of every century, and wake up, stumble downstairs with all our raging hope, sit down at the kitchen table again, still blurry-eyed, still tired, and say: Listen, we need to talk.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Como tú, I want to speak of myself in two languages at once.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Love is the right to say: I do and I do and I do . . .”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“You know, mijo, it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where you choose to die—that’s your country.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“We're the cure for the hatred caused by despair. We’re the good morning of a bus driver who remembers our name, the tattooed man who gives up his seat on the subway. We’re every door held open with a smile when we look into each other’s eyes the way we behold the moon. We’re the moon. We’re the promise of one people, one breath declaring to one another: I see you. I need you. I am you.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Then countries—your invention—maps
jigsawing the world into colored shapes
caged in bold lines to say: you’re here,
not there, you’re this, not that, to say:
yellow isn’t red, red isn’t black, black is
not white, to say: mine, not ours, to say
war, and believe life’s worth is relative.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn't choose, that
didn't choose me--trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“To love a country as if you’ve lost one: as if
it were you on a plane departing from America
forever, clouds closing like curtains on your country,
the last scene in which you’re a madman scribbling
the names of your favorite flowers, trees, and birds
you’d never see again, your address and phone number
you’d never use again, the color of your father’s eyes,
your mother’s hair, terrified you could forget these.
To love a country as if I was my mother last spring
hobbling, insisting I help her climb all the way up
to the U.S. Capitol, as if she were here before you today
instead of me, explaining her tears, cheeks pink
as the cherry blossoms coloring the air that day when
she stopped, turned to me, and said: You know, mijo,
it isn’t where you’re born that matters, it’s where
you choose to die—that’s your country.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Write one more stanza—now. Set the page ablaze
with the anger in the hollow ache of our bones—
anger for the new hate, same as the old kind of hate
for the wrong skin color, for the accent in a voice,
for the love of those we’re not supposed to love.
Anger for the voice of politics armed with lies, fear
that holds democracy at gunpoint.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“How I still want to sing despite all the truth
of our wars and our gunshots ringing louder
than our school bells, our politicians smiling
lies at the mic, the deadlock of our divided
voices shouting over each other instead of
singing together. How I want to sing again--
beautiful or not, just to be harmony--from
sea to shining sea--with the only country
I know enough to know how to sing for.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“How could you, America? With no answer for
all I knew of country was my hurt and rage.

But home was home: I dusted off the secrets,
cleaned up the lies, nailed the creaky floors
down, set a fire, and sat with history books
I’d never opened, listened to songs I’d never
played, pulled out the old map from a dark
drawer, redrew it with more colors, less lines.
I stoked the fire, burning on until finally: Okay,
nothing’s perfect, I understood, I forgive you,
I said—and forgiveness became my country.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“Let's raise our children together: let them ride the same school buses, learn the same history, swing in the same playgrounds, pedal their bikes down the same streets, share their same city.

Then we shall see face to face. Halleluiah.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“We can die as valiant as rainbows,
and hold light in our lucid bodies like blood.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“These contrasts were also meant to reflect the essential beauty and constant struggle of our democracy as expressed in our nation’s motto: e pluribus unum (out of many, one). We are a populace of individual “I’s” who have consented to come together as a “we.” The challenge has been to continuously question who is (or isn’t) included in that “we” and how to redefine and reimagine it.

Overall, we’ve managed to move toward a more inclusive understanding of ourselves and acceptance of each another. Historically, though, we have wavered and are currently at a crossroads: Are we going to advance toward a broader definition of “we” or will we retreat to a narrower one?”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country