Top 150 Jeanine Cummins Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “She thought that here in el norte, she’d have to worry more about Border Patrol, about the possibility of Luca being taken from her, and less about random men with guns enforcing their own decrees.”

— Jeanine Cummins

52. “That a closed door only invites closer scrutiny.”

— Jeanine Cummins

53. “This is not the kind of thing that happens, ever. Not even here. Do you know anyone else who’s lost sixteen family members in one day?” Meredith glares at him, but he plows ahead. “We have to help them. If the suffering of our friends means.”

— Jeanine Cummins

54. “What love had been there was already slipping away. She could still sense it like a ghost in the room, vague and inanimate, but she could no longer feel it. Her affection had gone, leached out, like blood from a cadaver. When he squeezed her fingers, she caught the scent of formaldehyde. When he hooked his sad gaze into hers, she saw the glass of his lenses, spattered with blood.”

— Jeanine Cummins

55. “If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?”

— Jeanine Cummins

56. “All the way from Chiapas to Chihuahua, they cling to the tops of the cars. The train has earned the name La Bestia because that journey is a mission of terror in every way imaginable. Violence and kidnapping are endemic along the tracks, and apart from the criminal dangers, migrants are also maimed or killed every day when they fall from the tops of the trains. Only the poorest and most destitute of people attempt to travel this way.”

— Jeanine Cummins

57. “Lydia tries her best not to consider the many words that will never come out of her mouth now, the sudden monster void of words she will never get to say.”

— Jeanine Cummins

58. “Lydia’s always been a devoted mother, but she’s never been the codependent kind who misses her child when he goes to school or to sleep. She’s always treasured that time to herself, to inhabit her own thoughts, to have a break from the nonstop emotional clamoring of motherhood.”

— Jeanine Cummins

59. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

60. “I communed with jackrabbits, lizards, and peculiar desert squirrels and felt astonished by how much life popped and teemed in the desert. The Sonoran birds made songs I’d never heard before.”

— Jeanine Cummins

61. “It’s unsettling to see, emboldened by the veracity of black and white, the most deeply suppressed grapplings of your own smothered conscience, printed right there in the newspaper for all the world to read.”

— Jeanine Cummins

62. “Lydia knows she’s increased their chances of survival. She needs to take encouragement where she can find it. She mustn’t despair at the enormity of the task yet ahead. She should focus only on the immediate next steps.”

— Jeanine Cummins

63. “Lydia thanks the girls, and her spoken gratitude feels entirely insufficient, because what she really needs to say is that the food, yes, but also their kindness, their humanity, their very existence, has nourished some withered, essential part of herself.”

— Jeanine Cummins

64. “Lydia knows a little about las colonias of Tijuana because she’s read the books, because Luis Alberto Urrea is one of her favorite writers, and he’s written about the.”

— Jeanine Cummins

65. “Everything about him changed when he talked about her – his voice, his face, his manner. His love for her was so earnest that he handled even the subject of her with tremendous care. Her name was like a fine glass bauble he was afraid of dropping.”

— Jeanine Cummins

66. “The first time a head turned up by itself on the street in Acapulco, it was a big deal.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

68. “It’s unusual in a culture where adult children take care of their aging parents that Lydia’s mother even had a savings account.”

— Jeanine Cummins

69. “If we get married, you choose me. I hope you’ll continue to choose me every day.”

— Jeanine Cummins

70. “She wonders if he feels anything now, or if he’s shut it all down, if Marta’s death was too much for him, so he found a loophole, a way to opt out of humanity. She is stronger than he is; she feels every molecule of her loss and she endures it. She is not diluted, but amplified. Her love for Luca is bigger, louder. Lydia is vivid with life.”

— Jeanine Cummins

71. “Because everything else is just chingaderas.”

— Jeanine Cummins

72. “We have to help them. If the suffering of our friends means nothing, if those kids can’t be allowed to see us, to see Mexico as it really is, then what are they even doing here? Are they just drive-by Samaritans?”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

74. “Somebody told me, before we got on the train,” he says, “if you fall, if you see your arm or your leg getting sucked under there, you have a split second to decide whether or not to put your head in there too.” The young man blinks into the camera. “I made the wrong choice,” he says.”

— Jeanine Cummins

75. “They perceive each other, the unspoken trauma they’ve both endured, their reasons for being here. It’s as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.”

— Jeanine Cummins

76. “If you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust?”

— Jeanine Cummins

77. “If I don’t look in the mirror, I can go around thinking I’m gorgeous when I’m not.”

— Jeanine Cummins

78. “He’s like a small, human bellows, and she a fire that’s dimmed to embers.”

— Jeanine Cummins

79. “Before dawn, Lydia, Luca, and the sisters walk deeper into the city, where they discover that the railway fence in Hermosillo is serious business, expensive infrastructure. Tax pesos at work. In fact, it’s not a fence at all, but a concrete wall topped with razor wire in threatening coils. Inside that wall, a train rumbles past with migrants asleep on top, their arms folded across their chests, their hats over their faces.”

— Jeanine Cummins

80. “The sky is scrubbed fresh and stark blue by the gone rain, but every trace of that water has evaporated from the earth around them. It feels like a dream, all that rainfall. ‘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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

81. “In the morning, a local resident drapes a hose over the garden wall so the migrants can brush their teeth, wet their faces, and fill their canteens. A contingent of older ladies walks the tracks, passing out blessings with homemade bagged sandwiches and pickles. A guard from the hut calls Luca over and passes him a grape lollipop through the chain-link fence.”

— Jeanine Cummins

82. “Sumac and mountain mahogany band together.”

— Jeanine Cummins

83. “Despite everything he’s been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation.”

— Jeanine Cummins

84. “No one can stay in a brutal, bloodstained place.”

— Jeanine Cummins

85. “Rebeca leans her head against her sister’s shoulder and watches the changing colors of the landscape. The sun sinks in front of them and turns the sandy earth orange and pink. The sky, too, is filled with crazy, vivid pinks and purples and blues and yellows, and the colors are slow to deepen, slow to slip into blackness, but when at last they are gone, the darkness is deeper and more vast than anything Luca has ever seen.”

— Jeanine Cummins

86. “How monumental Lydia’s grief had been when her father died! It terrifies her now, to think of it, how deeply formative that single loss was in her earlier life. Now there are sixteen more. 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

87. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

88. “Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. 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. There’s a frazzling thrum of confusion that arcs out of Luca’s brain when he tries to make those two facts sit side by side.”

— Jeanine Cummins

89. “If there’s one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief. She knows that she will soon have to contend with what’s happened, but for now, the possibility of what might happen still serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish.”

— Jeanine Cummins

90. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

91. “On this side, too, there are dreams.”

— Jeanine Cummins

92. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

93. “The noise thunders into her bones.”

— Jeanine Cummins

94. “The girl is so beautiful she seems almost to glow, more colorful than the landscape in which she sits. The dingy gray of the concrete overpass, the pebble brown of the tracks and the earth, the faded blue of her baggy jeans, the dirty white of her oversized T-shirt, the bleached arc of the sky, it all recedes behind her. Her presence is a vivd throb of color that deflates everything else around her. An accident of biology. A living miracle of splendor. It’s a real problem.”

— Jeanine Cummins

95. “She spits through the fence. Only to leave a piece of herself there on American dirt.”

— Jeanine Cummins

96. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

97. “Luca has difficulty reconciling all the genuine kindness of strangers. 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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

98. “Less than two weeks ago, dirt on the floor in her hallway was a thing that could annoy her. It’s unimaginable.”

— Jeanine Cummins

99. “I’ve seen bad things, too,” he assures her. “Yeah?” He nods. “I guess you wouldn’t be on top of this train if you hadn’t.”

— Jeanine Cummins

100. “There’s a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment – a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight – when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over the apex before the crash.”

— Jeanine Cummins