Quotes from Hector Tobar

chalcopyrite.

sin ti no existe un mundo mejor.

tirar para arriba

tirar para arriba, which literally means "to toss upward," but which is most often translated as "to overcome adversity.

lo único que hago es vivir

That's the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate," he says. "That's what's beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen." Now

cuerdos," he says. They're sane.

addition to the stresses and sorrows of a miner's life, there is the fortitude, brotherhood, and sense of self-worth mining's hypermasculine culture

cerro se está acomodando

Te espero por siempre

I will wait for you forever.

Their good vibes." Su buena vibra

I lose the thread

is one plank short of a bridge" (le falta un palo para el puente

Estas son la ma

Being trapped in the San José "is a test that God set before us so that we can think about the things we've done in our lives that were wrong," the Pastor says. "If we get out of this place, it will be like being reborn into the world.

overcoming obstacles [tirando para arriba

existe," he says. God exists.

I think that sometimes the only thing that can make you laugh is accepting the idea that there's no way out.

it felt like a hand had punched through the rock and reached out to us.

bond [cariño], a brotherhood

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now-- North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere

I just feel that art is more important than ever, that art is something that can unify us, that can make America stronger.

We're writers. What do we do? We tell stories. We make up stories. We create art.