Borderlands Quotes

“I can't seem to stay out of my own way.”
― Gloria Anzaldua

“So the Juárez/El Paso area before the recent drug violence was not a bilingual, bi-national, bicultural Zion, but it was one world. One entity. One place. One city where you could live in between worlds, and have the hope of creating something new. A third way to be, not along the border, but on the border.

That is what the violence has destroyed, that unity, however tenuous it ever was. It has destroyed the idea of that unity and the reality of living so uniquely astride an international border. This ‘real idea’ was always a work-in-progress, and for the moment it is lost. Yet that real idea of unity had great value.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Our Lost Border: Essays on Life Amid the Narco-Violence

“Some of us are always in the borderlands no matter where we might be on the map.”
― James Carlos Blake, Borderlands: Short Fictions

“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

“I believe we have reached a point where those of us who belong to this culture of la frontera in Ysleta and El Paso are not content to sit back and watch others tell us who we are. We know who we are, and we ourselves can tell others about what we love and what we fear and what we hate and what can save us. I believe our community has developed that confidence to step forward and start taking responsibility for the many images that are projected in the name of Ysleta and El Paso.”
― Sergio Troncoso, Crossing Borders: Personal Essays

“It's better to be happy than comfortable, if you can't have both.”
― Emma Bull, Finder

“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

“I should probably clarify -- the diamond horse I've been telling you about? It's not a sculpture, or anything. It's a living horse that actually happens to be made of -- actually, I'll just go get her. Butt Stallion! Say hello. (A horse whinnies.)
Butt Stallion says hello.”
― Dameon Clarke

“There is more betwixt the day and the night than we can ever know.”
― Sally Gardner, Tinder

“Turning to the northwest I see the much nearer fires on the hill, like a dwarfish volcano. Vigorous figures mill about the blazes, their shadows hopping and hobnobbing, like island natives beside a night-painted ocean. I might’ve been able to catch the sounds of their carnivalesque revelling if there weren’t so much music and mad gaiety behind me.

Far beyond the hill, the forest ends at the grey northern stretch of moorland with its dead whip of gritty roadway, down which I had seen the Night Hounds. Now, hooded figures trundle the same gloomy way. I wonder, are those druidic forms en route to the fire-capped hilltop? It seems a long way to go. Further north, past that winding road, the watching mountains tower, nigh-entirely disguised against the sky, one ebon peak protruding sharply, resembling an unapproachable pyramid or similar conical fortress. It must be some falsifying angle of light and shadow from the sky which has accentuated that dome in such a way - I well knew that those mountains should seem far smoother, more gentle, not nearly so sharp and craggy as that peak now appeared.”
― Avalon Brantley, The House of Silence

“Pero esta guerra de espinas,
ni el fuego la mueve.
Fuego quemando mi frente,
nopalito fuerte.”
― Gris Muñoz, Coatlicue Girl

“I believe the root of this strength of will came from my mother and father, from the work they taught me to do in the borderlands, the work that had broken many backs, the work that was a scream against the desert dust, this work that taught me about the song of nothingness in my bones and why the only way to live was to die on my feet.”
― Sergio Troncoso, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son

“Whenever I'm caught between two evils, I take the one I've never tried." Rubi the Pistol, Borderlands 2.”
― Borderlands 2