Quotes from Luis Alberto Urrea

Big Angel could not reconcile himself to this dirty deal they had all been dealt. Death. What a ridiculous practical joke. Every old person gets the punch line that the kids are too blind to see. All the striving, lusting, dreaming, suffering, working, hoping, yearning, mourning, suddenly revealed itself to be an accelerating countdown to nightfall. ....This is the prize: to realize, at the end, that every minute was worth fighting for with every ounce of blood and fire.

If it was the Border Patrol's job to apprehend lawbreakers, it was equally their duty to save the lost and the dying.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

Why was he thinking about work? About the past? It was over. It was all over. He was never going to work again. "This second," his father liked to tell him, "just became the past. As soon as you noticed it, it was already gone. Too bad for you, Son. It's lost forever.

Roses denote grace.

The sky peeled back for a moment, and a weak ray of sunset spilled over the scene like the diseased eye of some forgetful god -- the light bearing with it cold in place of heat.

Spanish! His family didn't even like speaking Spanish to him. He tried, and they insisted on answering him in English. Though they knew perfectly well that he spoke Spanish as well as they did and better than their children did. Each side had something to prove, and none of them knew what it was.

On that long westward morning, all Mexicans still dreamed the same dream. They dreamed of being Mexican. There was no greater mystery.

The world looked to them like a great roll of butcher paper unfurled on a table.

From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace-those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O'Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don't work out here. You need a new kind of prayers, she says to negotiate with this land.

I can't believe how many students don't read. They want to be writers, but they haven't read anything at all. They have looked at book covers, which usually allows them enough expertise to sneer, but they haven't read the books. How many young poets don't like poetry? How many fiction writers don't know Lehane from Nevada Barr?

If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.

Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.

Even Ignatius Loyola wavered. That dark night of the soul, man. No one's immune. It would all be meaningless if you didn't wonder and doubt. That's what makes it real. That's what makes us people. God could have sent angels to flutter around like fairies, delivering rum punch and manna all day on a cosmic cruise ship. But what would that avail us?

Families came apart and regrouped, she thought. Like water. In this desert, families were the water.

To my dogs," he announced, "I am a legend.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

The concept of a literature of witness - of bearing witness - has embedded in it the need for action. One must not simply hide in the shadows and type; one must also stand in the light.

When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis.

When 'The Hummingbird's Daughter' came out, there was a certain backlash - 'Well, this isn't 'The Devil's Highway.'' That's just the way it goes.

During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.

I had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns.

I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too.

I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.'