Quotes from Charles Bowden

There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.

Americans place 'strong subjective value' on the Father of Waters and will block any diminishment of its flow.

Vanishing here is always a possibility and it gives the city a special aura. Kidnappings are frequent, but they at least mean someone wants to return the missing and is acting in a rational manner where a human has a value in money and a feasible transaction is possible. Vanishing means a page left half-written, a tale never fully told. It is more final than execution because it means not simply being murdered but being erased from any real memory or participation in the human community.

Her smile is slight, like that of a little girl, and the eyes often small as if she is peering through a gun slit at a disappointing world. The hands are callused from work and rough when they touch and she is very strong. Once she grabs me from behind, puts on a choke hold and I begin to go black into unconsciousness. Then she giggles and releases her hold and light floods back into my brain and I marvel at her strength and caprice.

To ask what is the impact of developing groundwater in arid lands is simply to seek the price that must be paid for this unique human knack of influencing the availability of water. The answer is this: man builds water-rich societies in arid lands by living out of balance with his water supplies. He uses water faster than it can be replaced by rain. When this fact becomes obvious, people call it the groundwater problem.

When I tell people about the blooms, about how they open around nine and close before sunrise and do this just for one night, they always ask, Is that all? Yes. That's all.

The winters came early, the rains not often enough, the locusts rose in biblical scale, the land broke hard to the plow, the price for the crops hardly ever enough, the isolation beyond imagination, the long nights forever, and summer sun exploding in their faces and searing their dreams with flames.

Summertime is always the best of what might be.

I don't trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don't believe in white wine; I insist on color.

I can't even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don't even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.

I try to construct a theory of how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.

Being alive is gardening and cooking and birds and green and blue, at the very least.

There are two ways to lose you sanity in Juarez. One is to believe the violence results from a cartel war. The other is to claim to understand what is behind each murder.

Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of a bumbling imperialism. But what...is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States.

The comfortable way to deal with these stories is to say they are about them The way to understand these stories is to say they are about us.

There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?

Focusing on the dead women enables Americans to ignore the dead men, and ignoring the dead men enables the United States to ignore the failure of its free-trade schemes, which in Juarez are producing poor people and dead people faster than any other product.

We all share a biology and deep drives, and what we have created -- civilization, courtesy, decency -- is a mesh that comes from those drives and also contains and tames them. Whatever feels good is not necessarily good. But what I learn is whatever is bad is not necessarily alien to me. Or to you.

There can't be a summing up, a set of commandments, a safe and sacred way. That is the path to ruin. There is appetite, there is the shift of things, the change in weather, the melting of the ice, the new rivers gouged, and the songs we make up to help us keep going.

I try to construct a theory on how a moral person should live in these circumstances, and how such a person should love.

We think velocity is new, change is new, and this vast tumult and wave of fear is new. And we are wrong. There has never been firm ground for our lives and our only balm has been a forgetfulness of the changes we have endured.

I always remind myself of all the things I should note if I am to be a good person, one sound and balanced. One night . . . I reminded myself that 22 species of flowers were blooming in my backyard. . . . that fact helped a great deal.

Somehow the United States has become a nation with a permanent air of unreality and yet, by law, custom, or magic, has managed to severely restrict the choice of fantastic roles available to players in this unreality. Halloween is the last night left.

I don't know what to make of myself. A lot of the time, despite my deepest hungers and best efforts, I see blackness. But I am planting a young oak tree. I really am. It'll be here centuries after I'm gone. Assuming I choose to leave.