Quotes from Francisco Goldman

In U.S. discourse, immigrants are mostly represented as less than human, a policy problem, or as just that, a category, and categories are prisons.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

When I see a blatant injustice, I can't keep quiet. I've been that way since I was a little kid.

You witness a lot as a journalist, and what you witness becomes a part of you.

What's important about me is that I really have, in ways I never could have foreseen when I was young, a writing career that's reached a lot of different places.

I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.

The U.S., like any other country, allows tourists into its borders in order to make money off them, and there's nothing wrong with that. Why give out tourist visas if you're not going to let tourists be tourists?

I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.

Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that's my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada.

I can go years thinking that it seems impossible that I will ever satisfy that appetite again and then it is easy to satisfy and no one notices or cares, nor does it make me happy, when loneliness surrounds me like water I've already drowned in without dying.

Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it's like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever.

ONE AFTERNOON DURING THAT FINAL SPRING, AFTER SHE HAD TURNED THIRTY AURA TURNED TO ME FROM HER DESK WHILE I LAY ON THE BED READING, AND SHE SAID, 'WE HAVE EVERYTHING WE NEED TO BE HAPPY. WE DONT HAVE TO BE RICH. WE CAN GET JOBS IN THE UNIVERSITIES IF WE NEED THEM. WE HAVE OUR BOOKS, OUR READING, OUR WRITING, AND WE HAVE EACH OTHER, FRANK. WE DONT NEED MORE TO BE HAPPY, WE ARE SO LUCKY. DO YOU KNOW HOW LUCKY WE ARE?

Maybe that was how to heal. I told myself stories and learned that I could be made of the ones I chose to tell, not simply the ones that life had laid haphazardly around me.

That line from the Iliad, "Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.

El clasismo es una forma de violencia muy cabrona aquí en México. Es más: la misma POBREZA es una forma de violencia que los ricos imponen a los marginados de muchas formas [...]

ésta es una ciudad donde, en los últimos cuarenta años, los valores de la gente han ido cambiando más rápidamente que en el resto del país. ¿Por qué? Porque aquí están las universidades más grandes y más importantes, y eso lo cambia todo: eso incrementa el número de personas que piensan, que critican y analizan; se vuelven más sensibles y tolerantes.

I don't want to impose a retrospective clarity of will on what had certainly been months immersed in a flailing muddle, but if there isn't some truth to the narratives of progress with which we sometimes try to frame our lives, however rooted in desperate delusion, we'd never be able to speak them, certainly not silently to ourselves, with any conviction.

Los acuerdos del gobierno de Enrique Peña Nieto con los principales cárteles de la droga en México ya no pueden permanecer escondidos ni tras bambalinas. Son acuerdos que incluyen la repartición del territorio y su respectivo dominio para el trasiego de droga. Dentro de esos acuerdos seguramente

La corrupción política es el padre y la madre de la expansión de la violencia organizada en México»

en México «hay un pacto de impunidad tácito entre los políticos». Los políticos no investigan a otros políticos;

In one case I heard that the censor, in a city in Tamaulipas state, was a local journalist employed by a cartel who sat at a desk in a newspaper office making the final decisions about what that paper could publish and what it couldn't.

El alcalde tiene dos obligaciones que están por encima de cualquier otra: mantener la ciudad segura y gobernar de una manera claramente liberal y progresista. Perdido eso, la magia desaparecería.»

Para combatir la ilegalidad generalizada, México necesita políticos comprometidos con la ley. Por desgracia, ahora tiene un presidente que ha defendido públicamente el asesinato y la violación como usos legítimos de la fuerza.

I think the fact that my wife died in Mexico City makes it very important to me; my life went up in smoke at that moment, the family and the future we were going to have. At that point, I was anchored to the city in a way I've never been anchored to a place before.