Quotes from Luis Alberto Urrea

The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it's not a region at all. Maybe it's just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there.

Big Angel was late to his own mother's funeral.

Carnal, rocks remember when they were mountains.' They stared at the rocks in the garden. 'And what do mountains remember?' 'When they were ocean floors.' Big Angel, Zen master.

The Sinaloans had heard that the Sonorans indulged in the unspeakable atrocity of eating flour tortillas. Flour! Any human being knew that tortillas were made of corn.

She learned that women were braver than men. Braver and stronger. She learned that she herself could one day stretch open as wide as a window, and it would not kill her.

In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.

Each of the women elaborately ignored the other.

If you were born to be a nail, you cannot curse the hammer.

He believed he was celebrating them when he shared stories of their foibles. He felt the burden of being their living witness. Somehow the silliest details of their days were, to him, sacred. And he believed that if only the dominant culture could see these small moments, they would see their own human lives reflected in the other.

Some of the women, it must be said, had not yet accepted the idea that a woman could be Municipal President. They had been told that they were moody and flighty and illogical and incapable for so long that they believed these things.

The whole family had inherited the bizarre belief system of Antonio and América: instant coffee was some kind of miracle.

It was as if a dump truck had spilled a ton of humanity into the yard. Bodies were jammed onto the patio, elbowing gently to get at the new macaroni salad and ignoring the mustard coleslaw.

Cruz made the sign of the cross over them. He hefted his rifle onto his shoulder and walked away. His warriors followed, blessed by the Lord, reconciled, holy in this day He had made, and ready to shoot.

Big Angel didn't speak, just beamed like some small lighthouse.

Miguel Angel," he said, "It isn't hard to die. Everybody does it. Even flies do it. Everyone here is doing it. We're all terminal." He had a tear in his eye; Big Angel could see it brimming. "Your schedule is just different from mine.

Cutters read the land like a text. They search the manuscript of the ground for irregularities in its narration. They know the plots and the images by heart. They can see where the punctuation goes. They are landscape grammarians, got the Ph.D. in reading dirt.

Tell me," Big Angel said. "Did I do anything good in your life?" "You gave me the books." It was instantaneous. "Yes. All the books--that was pretty good. I gave you good ones." "And bad ones." "True. But all books are good, man. Imagine no books.

She is a karateka ," La Osa replied. "Nayeli could karate-kick you to death where you sit." "That's hardly feminine." He sniffed. "Perhaps," Nayeli suggested, "it is time for a new kind of femininity.

By the time he realized he was nowhere near Target, he was lost in a housing tract apparently formed entirely of cul-de-sacs.

On the cool October morning when Cayetana Chavez brought her baby to light, it was the start of that season in Sinaloa when the humid torments of summer finally gave way to breezes and falling leaves, and small red birds skittered through the corrals, and the dogs grew new coats.

Only an idiot would fail to see God in a meal!

The women posed for snapshots. Dozens of snapshots. . . . They imagined that, long after the soldiers had become old, perhaps even after they'd died, someone would come to wonder about these women holding up rifles or tommy guns or donuts and laughing with their grandfathers in front of the big dark truck.

La palabra 'migración' significaba para los de Tres Camarones la temporada en que el atún y las ballenas pasaban rumbo al norte por la costa, o cuando las guacamayas llegaban del sur. No sabían de otro significado

You see, Satan is not a monster. We don't see him when he comes because he has disguised himself in beauty. The devil is, after all, an angel of light. The Morning Star. Do not allow yourself to be seduced by the beautiful side of evil.