Quotes from Hector Tobar

I think even a hero is someone who has sort of the flaw or imperfection of character. I remember Alice Walker saying that once - she'd written a novel about a civil rights hero, and it was someone who had this flaw, this central flaw.

You cannot bribe a Chilean police officer - I know this firsthand.

I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.

As a professional journalist, I've been interviewing people for almost thirty years. And the one thing I've learned from all those interviews is that I am always going to be surprised.

I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.

I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.

You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin.

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

We aren't the best men, but Lord, have pity on us," Henríquez begins. It's a simple statement, but it strikes several of the men hard.

You see, Francisco, a warrior isn't just someone who slays dragons—or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie, Braveheart. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice.

If you can sit here and talk to a person you don't know very well, and talk about all these things you've been through—that's something. That's courage. It's knowing yourself.

Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men.

If you're working, it's the best therapy for posttraumatic stress," Juan says. Studies have shown that the gravity of posttraumatic stress is directly proportional to the length of time one lives with the threat of death, and Juan slowly unwinds the trauma of the sixty-nine days he lived inside a thundering mountain by going to work, fixing machines, then going back home, and then returning to work again.

The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about "El Pato" Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him.

In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.

If you make a man a symbol of things that are bigger than any one person can possibly be, you risk stripping that man of his sense of who he really is.

The devil is present in the mine, taking form in all the greed, the misunderstanding, the envy, and the betrayals among the men. He believes that the devil has come from the surface, attaching himself to those letters, the offers of money and fame, to pit them against one another.

We made a small place where people could go and let go of their pain, where they could pray for the miners, and start to forget that they might be dead," Carmen says.

We broke through.

Yo quiero orar!

importa," she says. It doesn't matter.

Vamos, Ministro, déle con fuerza. Confiamos en Usted