Top 150 Jeanine Cummins Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Because fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice. There will be no evidence, no due process, no vindication.”

— Jeanine Cummins

2. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

3. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

4. “Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled.”

— Jeanine Cummins

5. “Someone once told me that the only good advice for grief is to stay hydrated. Because everything else is just chingaderas.”

— Jeanine Cummins

6. “There’s a blessing in the moments after terror and before confirmation.”

— Jeanine Cummins

7. “Lydia is dubious at first, but if you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust?”

— Jeanine Cummins

8. “He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.”

— Jeanine Cummins

9. “The brothers are a deeply calming presence. They are warm bread. They are shelter.”

— Jeanine Cummins

10. “Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants.”

— Jeanine Cummins

11. “So he’s unaware of the way Newton’s third law can resonate in a place like this: for every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption.”

— Jeanine Cummins

12. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

13. “Lydia is constantly reminded that her education has no purchase here, that she has no access to the kind of information that has real currency on this journey. Among migrants, everyone knows more than she does. How do you find a coyote, make sure he’s reputable, pay for your crossing, all without getting ripped off?”

— Jeanine Cummins

14. “He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who’s ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional. He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet.”

— Jeanine Cummins

15. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

16. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

17. “As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond.”

— Jeanine Cummins

18. “Despite everything, he likes being alive. Lydia doesn’t know whether that’s true for herself. For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.”

— Jeanine Cummins

19. “Less than two weeks ago, dirt on the floor in her hallway was a thing that could annoy her. It’s unimaginable. The reality of what happened is so much worse than the very worst of her imaginary fears had ever been. But it could be worse still.”

— Jeanine Cummins

20. “The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference in either direction.”

— Jeanine Cummins

21. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

22. “So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future. A mother who had loaned her the money to open her bookstore. Though Lydia had been grateful, she’d never imagined that her mother’s eccentricity might one day save her life.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

24. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

25. “For all her love of words, at times they’re entirely insufficient.”

— Jeanine Cummins

26. “When she thinks of this, 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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

27. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

28. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

29. “She doesn’t have the reservoir of space to take anything else into her brain.”

— Jeanine Cummins

30. “I only meant because sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.”

— Jeanine Cummins

31. “Es mi cielo, mi luna, y todas mis estrellas. My sky, my moon, and all my stars.”

— Jeanine Cummins

32. “Everything we’ve been through?” Soledad says. “It’ll all be worth it. We’ll leave it behind and have a new beginning.” Rebeca looks at the floor but her eyes are unfocused. “Like it never happened,” she says. They.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

34. “The book is water in the desert.”

— Jeanine Cummins

35. “Acapulco always had a heart for extravagance, so when at last she made her fall from grace, she did so with all the spectacular pageantry the world had come to expect of her. The cartels painted the town red.”

— Jeanine Cummins

36. “Es mi cielo, mi luna, y todas mis estrellas.”

— Jeanine Cummins

37. “Hope cannot survive the poison of her recent proof: the world is a terrible place. San Pedro Sula was terrible, Mexico is terrible, el norte will be terrible. Even her gold-dappled memories of the cloud forest are beginning to rot and decay.”

— Jeanine Cummins

38. “A trick of God’s magic, the way a mother can trace herself sometimes, beneath the skin of her children.”

— Jeanine Cummins

39. “So Lydia is worried about all these things, and yet, 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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

40. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

41. “There’s a tug-of-war in his heart already, between wanting to remember and needing to forget. In the months to come, Luca will sometimes wish he hadn’t squandered these early days of his grief. He’ll wish he’d let it pierce and demolish him more. Because, as the forgetting part takes anchor and stays, it will feel like a treachery. He’ll mistakenly believe it’s his own cowardice erasing Papi’s details –.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

43. “Marta’s death changed everything, of course. It changed everything.”

— Jeanine Cummins

44. “Heart, You Bully, You Punk by Leah Hager Cohen and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry.”

— Jeanine Cummins

45. “San Pedro Sula: second-largest city in Honduras, a million and a half people, murder capital of the world. Out loud, he says, “Ah, you are Honduran.” “No,” Rebeca corrects him. “Ch’orti’.” Luca makes his face into a question. “Indian,” she explains. “My people are Ch’orti’.” Luca nods, even though he doesn’t really understand the difference.”

— Jeanine Cummins

46. “Trauma waits for stillness.”

— Jeanine Cummins

47. “For mothers, the question is immaterial anyway. Her survival is a matter of instinct rather than desire.”

— Jeanine Cummins

48. “It’s the bond of trauma, the bond of sharing an indescribable experience together. Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the characters they’ve met, the fear that travels with them, the grief and fatigue that eat at them. Their collective determination to keep pressing north.”

— Jeanine Cummins

49. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

50. “If a tourist mecca like Acapulco could fall, then nowhere in Mexico was safe.”

— Jeanine Cummins