Santa Cruz Quotes

“El 18 de noviembre de 1997 Luis Montiel no fue al colegio. A las cuatro de la tarde fue al galpón de su casa, se ató un alambre al cuello y se ahorcó. Lo encontró su abuelo. Lo descolgó Teresa, su tía enfermera. Al día siguiente, las puertas del ómnibus en el que sus compañeros regresaban de viaje de egresados se abrieron, y dos docenas de adolescentes eufóricos vieron lo imposible: Luis los estaba esperando. El velorio se hacía en el colegio.”
― Leila Guerriero, Los suicidas del fin del mundo: Crónica de un pueblo patagónico

“She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone

“His new friends did not, perhaps, realize the overpowering effect of the sudden change upon this northernbred man; the effects of the moonlight and the soft trade-wind, the life of love which surrounded him here. Love whispered to him vaguely, compellingly. It summoned him from the palm fronds, rustling dryly in the continuous breeze; love was telegraphed through the shy, bovine eyes of the brown girls in his estate-house village; love assailed him in the breath of the honey-like sweet grass, undulating all day and all night under the white moonlight of the Caribbees, pouring over him intoxicatingly through his opened jalousies as he lay, often sleepless, through long nights of spice and balm smells on his mahogany bedstead—pale grass, looking like snow under the moon.

The half-formulated yearnings which these sights and sounds were begetting were quite new and fresh in his experience. Here fresh instincts, newly released, stirred, flared up, at the glare of early-afternoon sunlight, at the painful scarlet of the hibiscus blooms, the incredible indigo of the sea—all these flames of vividness through burning days, wilting into a caressing coolness, abruptly, at the fall of the brief, tropic dusk. The fundament of his crystallizing desire was for companionship in the blazing life of this place of rapid growth and early fading, where time slipped away so fast.

("Sweet Grass")”
― Henry S. Whitehead

“Santa Cruz was the safest place on Earth I could imagine: my sweet hometown, where the forests kissed the beaches on foggy mornings and their tender whispers liked you to sleep at night”
― Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History