Quotes from Jeanine Cummins

They're both smart, quick to learn. But their lives have been so expansive, their traumas so adult. They are young women and now they're meant to clip themselves into a three-ring binder each day. They're meant to hang their jackets in lockers and flirt with boys in the hallways. They're supposed to regress into shapes that were never familiar to them.

Couldn't get on the train, huh?' Among other things, Soledad has a gift for changing the subject at exactly the right moment. She's more tentative than her sister, but it's hard to remain standoffish with Luca there, all eyelashes and coy dimples

She was a woman who had never been beautiful, but who took care to appear as if she might once have been.

Trauma waits for stillness.

he can put off knowing what he already knows. He can prolong the moment of irrational hope that maybe some sliver of yesterday's world is still intact.

When at last they begin to move, instead of happiness or relief, they all feel a tentative, miniature suspension of dread.

If only their bodies could pass unimpeded along these highways as quickly and safely as her finger traces the route along the map.

She slams the trunk, walks back to the front seat to select one of his notebooks, not yet allowing herself to consider the reason she does this—to retain a personal record of his extinct handwriting.

you. Because people are complex

There are twenty-three migrants here, and despair has settled into their features like a powdery dust.

she feels as tatty as a scrap of lace, defined not so much by what she's made of, but more by the shapes of what's missing.

And finally, there's the ubiquity of ordinary human violence: You can die by beating or stabbing or shooting. Robbery is a foregone conclusion. Mass abductions for ransom are commonplace. Often, kidnappers torture their victims to help persuade their families to pay. On

She has a new understanding about the futility of worry. The worst will either happen or not happen, and there's no worry that will make a difference in either direction. Don't think.

can tell she didn't swallow any. "I'm sorry, it's too risky," Meredith says. "It's not fair to

into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn't even want them.

Unfortunately, the very characteristic that led him to embody the goodness that surrounded him also led him to embrace evil when he met it.

The worst will either happen or not happen, and there's no worry that will make a difference in either direction. Don't think.

later drafts of this novel and encouraging me

Era la sed y el hambre, y tú fuiste la fruta. Era el duelo y las ruinas, y tú fuiste el milagro. —Pablo Neruda, "La canción desesperada

Por mais que ame as palavras, por vezes elas são completamente insuficientes.

Amor en los tiempos del cólera, first in Spanish, then again in English. No one can take this from her. This book is hers alone.

Luis Alberto Urrea, Óscar Martínez, Sonia Nazario, Jennifer Clement, Aída Silva Hernández, Rafael Alarcón, Valeria Luiselli, and Reyna Grande.

It was exciting for him to be good at something after a lifetime of mediocrity in Tamaulipas.

Sumac and mountain mahogany band together