Luis Alberto Urrea > Quotes

“...There was nothing one could do when love came. It was fast, and it was strong, and if it were not good, then surely God would not have allowed it such power.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“This is how Heaven works. They're practical. We are always looking for rays of light. For lightning bolts or burning bushes. But God is a worker, like us. He made the world — He didn't hire poor Indios to build it for him! God has worker's hands. Just remember — angels carry no harps. Angels carry hammers.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“Owls visited them at night. Some thought the owls were witches. Some thought they were angels of death. Some thought they were holy and brought blessings. Some thought they were the restless spirits of the dead. The cowboys thought they were owls.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“Words are the only bread we can really share.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea

“What we take from granted in the United States as being Mexican, to those from southern Mexico, is almost completely foreign. Rural Mexicans don't have the spare money to drown their food in melted cheese. They don't smother their food in mounds of sour cream. Who would pay for it? They have never seen "nachos." In some regions of the south, they eat soup with bananas; some tribal folks not far from Veracruz eat termite tacos; turkey, when there are turkeys, is not filled with "stuffing"―but with dry pineapples, papaya, pecans. Meat is killed behind the house, or it is bought, dripping and flyblown, off a wooden plank in the village market. They eat cheeks, ears, feet, tails, lips, fried blood, intestines filled with curdled milk. Southerners grew up eating corn tortillas, and they never varied in their diet. You find them eating food the Aztecs once ate. Flour tortillas, burritos, chimichangas―it's foreign food to them, invented on the border.
They were alliens before they ever crossed the line.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“That is the prize: to realize, at the end, that every minute was worth fighting for with every ounce of blood and fire.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“There is a minute in the day, a minute for everyone, though most everyone is too distracted to notice its arrival. A minute of gifts coming from the world like birthday presents. A minute given to every day that seems to create a golden bubble available to everyone.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“When you died, you died in small doses. You had trouble speaking. You forgot who was beside you. You were suddenly furious and in a panic of outrage. You wished you could be saintly. You wished you weren't so weak. You suddenly felt better and fooled yourself into believing that a miracle was about to happen. Well, wasn't that all a dirty rotten thing to pull on somebody.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“If it was the Border Patrol’s job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Big Angel could not reconcile himself to this dirty deal they had all been dealt. Death. What a ridiculous practical joke. Every old person gets the punch line that the kids are too blind to see. All the striving, lusting, dreaming, suffering, working, hoping, yearning, mourning, suddenly revealed itself to be an accelerating countdown to nightfall.
....This is the prize: to realize, at the end, that every minute was worth fighting for with every ounce of blood and fire.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

“And everyone loved sunsets. The light lost its sanity as it fell over the hills and into the Pacific--it went red and deeper red, orange, and even green. The skies seemed to melt, like lava eating black rock into great bite marks of burning. Sometimes all the town stopped and stared west. Shopkeepers came from their rooms to stand in the street. Families brought out their invalids on pallets and in wheelbarrows to wave their bent wrists at the madness consuming their sky. Swirls of gulls and pelicans like God's own confetti snowed across those sky riots.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“On that long westward morning, all Mexicans still dreamed the same dream. They dreamed of being Mexican. There was no greater mystery.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“Why was he thinking about work? About the past? It was over. It was all over. He was never going to work again. “This second,” his father liked to tell him, “just became the past. As soon as you noticed it, it was already gone. Too bad for you, Son. It’s lost forever.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“The world looked to them like a great roll of butcher paper unfurled on a table.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

“From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace-those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O'Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don't work out here. "You need a new kind of prayers," she says "to negotiate with this land.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Roses denote grace.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“All these women, Huila thought: Mothers of God. These skinny, these dirty and toothless, these pregnant and shoeless. These with an issue of blood, and these with unsuckled breasts and children cold in the grave. These old forgotten ones too weak to work. These fat ones who milked all day. These twisted ones tied to their pallets, these barren ones, these married ones, these abandoned ones, these whores, these hungry ones, these thieves, these drunks, these mestizas, these lovers of other women, these Indians, and these littlest ones who faced unknowable tomorrows. Mothers of God. If it was a sin to think so, she would face God and ask Him why. “The”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“Spanish! His family didn't even like speaking Spanish to him. He tried, and they insisted on answering him in English. Though they knew perfectly well that he spoke Spanish as well as they did and better than their children did. Each side had something to prove, and none of them knew what it was.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“The sky peeled back for a moment, and a weak ray of sunset spilled over the scene like the diseased eye of some forgetful god -- the light bearing with it cold in place of heat.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

“Families came apart and regrouped, she thought. Like water. In this desert, families were the water.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it’s not a region at all. Maybe it’s just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Tomas led a young woman by the hand and walked up into the foothills. Millian, the miner from Rosario, had introduced her to the patron, already buying points for himself. He was no fool. And the girl, no fool either, lifted her skirts for Tomas as he knelt before her, licking his way up her thighs -brown and sweet as candy, at the same time, tart and salty, musky, silken and cold in the warm air, refreshing as the sorbet he licked in Culiacan back when he was a student. She was amazed that this bit of her body could the great master to his knees before her. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl on that whole plain, but he did not her name and felt no need to ask. He pressed his face to her underwear, redolent with the burning scent of her, and he pulled the cotton down, over the bright points of her hips , the shadowy curve of her belly, until the fog of dark hair came into his sight, soft in the moonlight, tickling his face as he bent down to her again. He pressed his lips on the mound of her, breathing her in, tasting her like a dog, as her skirts fell over his head and her fingers pulled his head tighter to her, her legs moving apart in the dark, her beauty falling around him, his greatest gift to him, this flavor, this smell, her scent.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Hummingbird's Daughter

“These children are so stupid; they think they are the first to discover the world.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels

“That irked the crap out of him, but maybe that's just what happens when you get old. Everything's so damned irksome.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Water Museum

“Rita Vargas caught her breath—the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“To my dogs,” he announced, “I am a legend.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels