Quotes from Luis Alberto Urrea

I have often said I come from a family of unreliable narrators. I tend to believe their struggles with racism, identity, nationality do dovetail with my motivation to write.

I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it.

It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them.

I'm always trying to, using literature, subvert people's responses.

I'm interested in the eternal soul. That's what I write about.

It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this.

These children are so stupid; they think they are the first to discover the world.

Fat green frogs, the eternally grinning type destined to be shellacked into bizarre poses while wearing mariachi hats and holding toy trumpets and guitars and then sold in tourist traps all over Mexico, jostled lazily in the dappled shadows.

Big Angel had never noticed his mother's endowment before. Suddenly, she seemed to be blessed with an expanse of pillowy flesh. And she tucked the parrot into that cleavage, adjusting herself as it sank from view, finishing the operation by using her thumb on its head to get it well positioned in the shadows. She adjusted her bust and said, "Let's go to San Diego, boys!

Doesn't every town in America have an old-timer called The Professor? That duffer who knows everything and everybody, as long as they are dead.

That irked the crap out of him, but maybe that's just what happens when you get old. Everything's so damned irksome.

There were other things, though. There were always more details trailing any good story. Like tin cans on the back bumper of a newlywed's car. Rattles and pings and wonderful small moments spinning in the wake of a great life.

If only Mexico paid their workers a decent wage.

Who was to say that God did not use the coyote's teeth to eat His gifts?

No wonder Americans seemed crazy to everybody else--they were utterly alone in the vastness of this ridiculously immense land. They all skittered about, alighting and flying off again like frantic butterflies. Looking for--what? What were they looking for?

Who was she to say that God did not use the coyote's teeth to chew His gifts?

This ain't what we are, homes," Lalo says. "This is not us. This is the story they tell about us, but it's not true.

Back at the house. How could you end a whole era and bury a century of life and be home before suppertime? 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.

My friend,' he said, 'no one is more ired of religion than a priest.

Blessed are you when you pray for others. Shame on you when you pray out of selfishness and greed (311).

listen carnales listen to the hymn of it, the lie of it, the prayer of it, the voices singing our names: listen it's our story, it's our song

Don Pepe was a Mexican man: a fatalist. He meant to impart much more than comfort. He meant that all good things would also end. All joy would crumble. And death would visit each and every one of them. He meant that regimes and ancient orders and cultures would all collapse. The world as we know it becomes a new world overnight.

This young woman is an infernal abortion. She is Satan incarnate, for who is better to portray Satan than a rebellious woman?

They breathed. They felt their lungs fill the sky, and they let the dark clouds inside them flow out. Then they connected to the earth.