Patricia Engel > Quotes

“And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“Emigration was a peeling away of the skin. An undoing. You wake each morning and forget where you are, who you are, and when the world outside shows you your reflection, it's ugly and distorted; you've become a scorned, unwanted creature.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“Her father said the death of a loved one was like a house on fire. Even with everything intact, it still felt like mere ashes.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“You don’t ‘find’ love, mi amor. You choose it. And then to keep love, you must choose it again, day after day.”
― Patricia Engel, It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

“Don’t tell me I’m undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father’s arm”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don't exist without a paper trail. I have a drawer full of diaries and letters I never sent to my grandmother, my father, even to my younger sister that will prove to anyone I am very real, most definitely documented; photos taped to our refrigerator, snapshots taken at the Sandy Hill house or other friends' fiestas, the Sears portraits our mother used to dress up for every year, making us seat on bus seats still as statues so we wouldn't wrinkle to have a perfect picture to send back to her mother. Don't tell me I'm undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father's arms.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“Another word I hate: minority. A way to imply we’re outnumbered (we’re not), and suggest we are less than.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“It’s a sea of death,” Universo said. “But the water remembers what civilization tries to forget.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“You'll be okay, niña. It's like driving these mountain roads. You can't see what's ahead if you keep looking in the rearview mirror.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They're wrong. It's love.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“Soon after our father arrived we went to a party in our old neighborhood and introduced him to our friends from the basement days. When a cumbia came on, he asked our mother to dance, and we watched our parents sway, finding each other’s rhythm as if they’d never fallen out of step, as if the past fifteen years were only a dance interrupted waiting for the next song to play. I wondered about the matrix of separation and dislocation, our years bound to the phantom pain of a lost homeland, because now that we are together again that particular hurt and sensation that something is missing has faded. And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“When you leave one country for another, nobody tells you years will bleed together like rain on newsprint. One year becomes five. Five years become ten. Ten years become fifteen. She never thought that when she left on the plane with Maulo, it would be the last time to see her mother in the flesh.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“She wondered about that, if by birth one could already be out of step with destiny, but only replied that she was very tired and ready to sleep.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“The only way to get what we want from life is to ask for it.” I”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“...the only thing people resent more than poor immigrants are wealthy ones”
― Patricia Engel, It's Not Love, It's Just Paris

“I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“When you get to the United States, nobody will understand you. I don't mean just the language. It's a country of strangers. It will be another kind of sentence. But one that as an immigrant you won't be able to escape.

You think this country is so much better?

No, but it's a land of brothers and sisters. You want to go to a place where you'll be invisible.

I want to be with my mother.

Colombia is your mother too.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they're just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“There are things I wanted to tell my sister before her arrival. Like that you can love the United States of Diasporica and still be afraid of it. The day after the last election, some kids came skipping into home room like a war was won. Hearing cocaine jokes and mechanical hallway insults of “go back to your country” was nothing new for me and Nando, but there was new brazenness, like a gloved hand reaching for our throats, reminding us we were not welcome.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“Mo and the staff talk about captivity like it's the best thing a dolphin can hope for, but that kind of talk just makes me think of Carlito and all the years he spent trapped by the routines of prison life in a six-by-nine-foot prison cell, the size of a parking space, and what Dr. Joe used to say about inmates like my brother who were also sentenced to solitary confinement: 'It doesn't have to be violent for it to be torture.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“Again, I think of Carlito. The years I tried to serve his sentence with him, and how he let me. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I hoped that he'd see in my eyes how I'd stopped living for anything and anyone but him, and that he would tell me not to come back.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“I think of my mother and how, when I was a child, she'd take me into the water with her and I felt time suspended in her embrace. How badly I've wanted to return to those moments. We remained under the same roof, but the years pulled us apart, so we could never recover the softness I felt from her under the sun, amid the waves.

Here, in the open ocean, with nobody to hold me at the surface but myself, I become sad for what's become of my mother and me, the ways life hardened us to one another.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“When he found out his wife was unfaithful, Hector Castillo told his son to get in the car because they were going fishing. It was after midnight but this was nothing unusual. The Rickenbacker Bridge suspended across Biscayne Bay was full of night fishermen leaning on the railings, avoiding going home to their wives. Except Hector didn't bring any fishing gear with him. He led his son, Carlito, who'd just turned three, by the hand to the concrete wall, picked him up by his waist, and held him so that the boy grinned and stretched his arms out like a bird, telling his papi he was flying, flying, and Hector said, "Si, Carlito, tienes alas, you have wings."

Then Hector pushed little Carlito up into the air, spun him around, and the boy giggled, kicking up his legs up and about, telling his father, "Higher, Papi! Higher!" before Hector took a step back and with all his might hoisted the boy as high in the sky as he'd go, told him he loved him, and threw his son over the railing into the sea.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“He wanted to convey to his daughter the price of leaving, though he had difficulty finding the words. What he wanted to say was that something is always lost; even when we are the ones migrating, we end up being occupied.”
― Patricia Engel, Infinite Country

“In the old house in Miami, I'd wake with the feeling of a hand on my chest, my eyes open to the murky blue half-light of my bedroom. Everything quiet, though still feeling noise all around me, though my ears, behind my eyes, under my skin.

In the cottage, I fall asleep slowly, counting the sounds of the night animals - crickets, frogs, squealing raccoons, a cat in heat somewhere beyond the coco plum trees.

But mine is still a loneliness that shakes me from my sleep.

I can forget my solitude all day, through my working hours, through errands, the evening housecleaning ritual I've made up for the cottage.

Yet night remains a tomb, when I'm most vulnerable, lying down for rest without distraction.

Only this body and that darkness, the whispers of the never-ending noche:

You belong to no one. No one belongs to you.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“You only community was y our family. From the world beyond your tios and primos, you were made to understand, before you could spell your own name, that even if you were born in this country, even if you speak the language, you will always be an outsider; this country will never belong to you.”
― Patricia Engel, Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

“My mother taught me to read hands at the same time she taught me to apply polish. Not by reading the lines of a palm, but the way she'd learned from her mother and her mother before her, by touch, decoding the curves of the hand without looking. Carlito never knew about our ability. Our mother never shared those things with him. She said there were some things that were meant to stay between mothers and daughters. It was by holding my brother's hands, once when I went to see him at the jail during the first days after his arrest, running my fingers over the rough swells at the base of his fingers, that I knew that even though Carlito was still screaming injustice, he was guilty and would never again walk free.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean

“So, what's the secret of life?
You don't know? It's so simple.
I shake my head.
Love.”
― Patricia Engel, The Veins of the Ocean