Border Crossing Quotes

“This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“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

“Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways.”
― Terri Windling

“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

“This is the moment of Lydia's crossing. Here at the back of this cave somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains, Lydia sheds the violent skin of everything that's happened to her. It rolls down from her tingling scalp off the mantle of her shoulders and down the length of her body. She breathes it out. She spits it into the dirt. Javier. Marta. Everything. Her entire life before this moment. Every person she loved who is gone. Her monumental regret. She will leave it here.

She stands at Lorenzo's feet.

She turns away from him.

'I forgive you,' she says.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“Online, the distances just vanish, horizons widen, dismissing borders, setting no limits.”
― Lana M. Rochel, Third Time's a Charm: True Story

“Angie was a border crosser, a wetback, a worker in the immigrant sweatshop they call this city. On days like this I understand her like a woman instead of a child. Everybody thought she was a whore. She wasn’t. She tried to step across the border of who she was and who she might be. They wouldn’t let her. She didn’t believe it herself so she stepped across into a whole other country.”
― Dionne Brand, What We All Long For

“It seems jolly on the page. But imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know. Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let's take it further - you've said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border

“And yet, despite this portrait of a self assured woman, Cindy seemed to have a near obsession with being where everyone was and doing what everyone was doing.”
― Imbolo Mbue

“You cross a border because you are searching, because you want more, because you want to match where you are with who you are, because you want to test your place. Maybe because you want to expand your sense of place. You are searching for something that may as yet be indefinable. A border crosser questions the very idea of home.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Nepantla Familias: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature on Families in between Worlds

“Border guards in Canada ask if ou're bringing any firearms into their country. On this side, they just wanna know about cigarettes. Unless you're visibly Nish. Then you get the full questioning. And if you're Nish and Black, like my uncle Art? You get a gun pulled on you at the border with your Nish wife and baby daughters in their car seats”
― Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter

“Notably, during this era, the notion of illegal immigration did not conjure the same political and legal consequences that it would after 1965 [...] The southern border of the United States was not militarized or guarded in the manner it would become in the late twentieth century, and seasonal, uncapped migration from Mexico was an accepted and expected labor reality.”
― Pratheepan Gulasekaram, The New Immigration Federalism

“... taking some precautions may attract unwanted attention and scrutiny, even if the precautions otherwise succeed in protecting your information. For example, if detected by a border agent, the fact that you wiped your hard drive may prompt the agent to ask why you did so. Even traveling without devices or data that most travelers typically have could attract suspicion and questions.”
― Sophia Cope, Digital Privacy at the U.S. Border: Protecting the Data on Your Devices and in the Cloud

“Men stumbled away toward illusions in the brutal light. Men thought they were home, walking into their front doors, hugging their wives, making love. Still they walked. Men were swimming. Men were killing Mendez. Men were on the beach, collecting shells and watching their children splash. Their women stood naked before them, soft bellies, hands on ribs, breasts. Men hid their faces from a furious God. And they walked.

A voice was heard in the light-shatter, saying “He’s going to die. Lay him down here and let him die. Keep walking.”

The desert, out of focus and suddenly terribly sharp, burst white and yellow in their eyes. It tilted. Elongated. It was at an impossible angle! It tipped up towards the sun, and if they didn’t crawl, they would slide right off it and fall forever. It made noise: there were engines beneath the desert. It made evil grinding noises, mechanical humming. No, it was insectile, the screech of hunger and derision. The devils were under the rocks, spitting insults. The black head laughed. I believe in God the father, creator of heaven and earth. No, it did not fucking laugh—- it was silent as a graveyard out there. Just the crunch and slide, crunch and slide, of endless hopeless footsteps. Hundreds of footsteps.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story

“Only those who cross the border qualify for the legal designation of 'refugee'. International agencies and the international media tend to focus mainly on those who cross borders. But those people displaced from their homes who seek sanctuary elsewhere in their country should not drop off the international agenda, and their practical needs of sanctuary often go unmet. Since mass violence occurs in states that are fragile, even though much of a country may remain safe the state is unlikley to have the capacity to cope.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The bridge was built over the Rió Grande, and sometimes we crossed it by foot and other times we went in the car. The bridge was a magical place, with people walking or driving back and forth. If you drove over the bridge, you were greeted by street vendors, windshield washers, performers, and all sorts of interesting people and cars.

We crossed the bridge to visit family and loved ones, to work, to play, and to shop. The bridge connected us to our dreams and to the possibilities they contained. The bridge was our link to our past and to the future it has helped create, and each time I crossed it, I celebrated the long journey of my ancestors.”
― Raúl the Third, ¡Vamos! Let's Cross the Bridge