Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

Luca feels unmoored from the boundaries of time that have always existed.

También de este lado hay sueños. On this side, too, there are dreams.

Late into the night she reads, and the lamplight falls in a soft circle across her tented knees, across the warm blankets, across Luca's casting breath. In their new home, Lydia rereads Amor en los tiempos del colera, first in Spanish, then again in English. No one can take this from her. This book is hers alone.

The book is water in the desert.

Now and again when a book moved her, when a book opened a previously undiscovered window in her mind and forever altered her perception of the world, she would add it to those secret ranks.

Lydia understands that it's not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants.

There's a tug-of-war in his heart already, between wanting to remember and needing to forget.

Lydia's English is a help, but there are many different languages in el norte. There are codes Lydia hasn't yet learned to decipher, subtle differences between words that mean almost, but not quite the same thing: migrant, immigrant, illegal alien. She learns that there are flags that people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome. She is learning.

This is a cycle, she thinks. Every day a fresh horror, and when it's over, this feeling of surreal detachment. A disbelief, almost, in what they just endured. The mind is magical. Human beings are magical.

No one can stay in a brutal, bloodstained place.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.

She doesn't rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.

She points the phone back to her own face. 'So can we be finished now, yes? Or should we keep on killing people?' Javier unleashes a noise that's half sob and half laughter. He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.

It seems impossible that good people – so many good people – can exist in the same world where men shoot up whole families at birthday parties and then stand over their corpses and eat their chicken.

This silk tassel tree has grown up from his spine, the indigenous plants have flourished and died here around his ankles, the fox, sparrows and meadowlarks have nested in his hair, the rains and wind and sun have beaten down across the rigid expanse of his shoulders, and Luca has never moved. We are rocks.

To have hope in these times is an act of courage. To experience catastrophic sadness, to recognize the brutality of life, and still maintain hope--That is everything. Because in order to flourish in the desert, to grow in the bleak, shallow dust and still believe in the possibility of beauty requires a special kind of persistence, It's not only patience and grit and strength, I realized. It's also faith.

Sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.

Ángela has been a nurse in this city long enough to know that the pain of the family often eclipses the pain of the patient.

She's aware that she and her companions represent something to these men. They look like home. Or they look like salvation. Or they look like prey. To an halcón they might look like reward money.

Many of them look Luca and Mami right in the eye, and say, "God bless you," and they smile. Luca would like to smile back, but he feels peculiar, too. He is unaccustomed to pity.

Her body feels like cracked glass, already shattered, and held in place only by a trick of temporary gravity. One wrong move and she will come to pieces.

Her hatred is a living succubus, vast enough and quick enough and wicked enough to crest up from her heart and take wing, to expand across the hundreds of miles between them, to engulf the whole city of Acapulco, to veil the room in which he's standing, to overshadow him and overcome him, to slip into his mouth and choke him from the inside out. She hates him so much she can murder him from sixteen hundred miles away, just by wishing for it.

She feigns confidence in the way all mothers know how to do in front of their children. She wears the fierce maternal armor of deceit.

And she'd believed, truly, that Javier wouldn't hurt them. What she wouldn't give to go back to that moment with Sebastián, to say anything else.