How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can't remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. (1.1)
At the opening of the novel, Esperanza feels like a vagabond – her family has moved so often that she doesn't feel like she can claim any one place as home.
Quote #2
The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it's not the house we'd thought we'd get. (1.2)
Esperanza sounds relieved to feel like her family actually owns a home – they can call the place they occupy their own.
Quote #3
I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn't it. The house on Mango Street isn't it. (1.11)
This is where Esperanza's obsession with owning a house is born.
Quote #4
All around, the neighborhood of roofs, black-tarred and A-framed, and in their gutters, the balls that never came back down to earth […] and there at the end of the block, looking smaller still, our house with its feet tucked under like a cat. (9.4).
Seen from above, Esperanza's house looks even smaller than it usually does. Still, Esperanza doesn't describe it here with her usual bitterness. Maybe her changed perspective on the house causes her to feel less disappointed in it for a moment.
Quote #5
Those who don't know any better come into our neighborhood scared […] But we aren't afraid. We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby's brother, and the tall one next to him in the straw brim, that's Rosa's Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he's Fat Boy, though he's not fat anymore nor a boy. (12.1)
Though Esperanza often says she feels like she doesn't belong on Mango Street, in this paragraph she expresses a sense of ownership or belonging, referring to it as "our neighborhood."
Quote #6
Only thing I can't understand is why Ruthie is living on Mango Street if she doesn't have to, why is she sleeping on a couch in her mother's living room when she has a real house all her own, but she says she's just visiting and next weekend her husband's going to take her home. But the weekends come and go and Ruthie stays. (26.8)
To Esperanza at this point, the idea of a real house in the suburbs sounds like an appealing place to call home. The mention of Ruthie's husband who never comes to get her is a little ominous, however – we suspect that something bad may have happened to Ruthie.
Quote #7
Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the walls of the apartment pink, but it's not the same, you know. She still sighs for her pink house, and then I think she cries. I would. (30.9)
Esperanza is able to relate to Mamacita's feelings of isolation and longing for home.
Quote #8
¡Ay caray! We are home. This is home. Here I am and here I stay. Speak English. Speak English. Christ! (30.14)
For Mamacita and her husband, both immigrants, the idea of home is linked to being able to speak the same language as the people in their community.
Quote #9
She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission. She looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake. (40.3)
Sally's new house doesn't feel much like a home – it feels more like a cage.
Quote #10
No, this isn't my house I say and shake my head as if shaking could undo the year I've lived here. You have a home, Alicia, and one day you'll go there, to a town you remember, but me I never had a house, not even a photograph…only one I dream of. (42.3)
Esperanza envies Alicia for at least having the memory of a home to think about.
Quote #11
Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after. (43.1)
Esperanza's dream house, "A House of My Own," recalls Virginia Woolf's feminist treatise, "A Room of One's Own."
Quote #12
We didn't always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, but what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong to but do not belong to. (44.4)
The repetition of the first phrase of the novel causes us to pay more attention to the small segment that's different this time around: now what Esperanza remembers most isn't "moving a lot," but the house on Mango Street.