Quotes About Struggle

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

The body shuts down when it has too much to bear; goes its own way quietly inside, waiting for a better time, leaving you numb and half alive.

If the pain and destruction wasn't a kind of creation, too: the violence of birth, that kind of idea.

I have been stabbed, shot, burned, bitten, beaten unconscious too many times to count, and even staked. None of those held a candle to the pain I felt at seeing his mouth on hers.

That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture 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.

For all her love of words, at times they're entirely insufficient.

She'd hoped, like one of those desert rattlesnakes, to shed the skin of her anguish and leave it behind her in the Mexican dirt.

Lydia has a growing sense that her very humanity is under siege,

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.

No one can stay in a brutal, bloodstained place.

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.

She sticks her hand through the fence and wiggles her fingers on the other side. Her fingers are in el norte. She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.

none of them had chosen to marry Sebastián, or to take on the risks of his profession as their own. Only she had done that, and now her family had paid for her choice. The fears of her past and the horrors of her present are so mixed up they feel like the unmatching pieces of a rompecabezas, like she's trying to piece together things that were never meant to fit.

At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings.

Hell is wet and cold and black and lost. Her brain tap-dances and contracts,

The flashbacks dump adrenaline into her bloodstream a hundred times a day, so her body is helpfully exhausted.

So there it is. The welling reservoir of grief, keen and profound beneath the bruise, the proof of her humanity, still intact. She needs to bury it back where it was. She can't indulge it yet.

She's wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture 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.

Every one of them, once or twice at least, every one of them despairs. The only thought that sustains them is the notion that each moment they endure this misery is one less moment they have yet to endure.

She's been afraid for so long that now she can't catch up to the facts: it was already him, and the rest of her family. It really did happen; all those years of worry did not prevent it.

for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.

At worst, we perceive them as an invading mob of resource-draining criminals, and, at best, a sort of helpless, impoverished, faceless brown mass, clamoring for help at our doorstep. We seldom think of them as our fellow human beings. People with the agency to make their own decisions, people who can contribute to their own bright futures, and to ours, as so many generations of oft-reviled immigrants have done before them.