Top 150 Jeanine Cummins Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Because everything else is just chingaderas.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

53. “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

54. “Trauma waits for stillness.”

— Jeanine Cummins

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “The noise thunders into her bones.”

— Jeanine Cummins

62. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “On the trains, a uniform seldom represents what it purports to represent.”

— Jeanine Cummins

76. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

77. “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

78. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

79. “The absolute absence of him feels like unmitigated terror.”

— Jeanine Cummins

80. “They kept nothing of import from each other, but Lydia liked having a sacred cupboard within herself, to which only she was allowed access.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

82. “Then he has the idea that perhaps the scent is finite, and he fears he might use it all up, so he stops touching it.”

— Jeanine Cummins

83. “He mispronounces the word hombres in the style of the US president who, attempting to call migrants bad men, inadvertently referred to them as bad hunger instead. It’s a joke now, full of irony. Bad hunger. El comandante toes the line.”

— Jeanine Cummins

84. “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

85. “Lydia feels annoyed that her niece won’t get to see the music box she purchased for her special day. How expensive it was! She realizes, even as this thought occurs to her, how bizarre and awful it is, but she can’t stop it from crashing in. She doesn’t rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.”

— Jeanine Cummins

86. “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

87. “Luca likes to listen to the foreign sounds, the peaks and rolls of the words he doesn’t understand. He likes the way voices sound the same in every language, the way, if you train your ear to listen just outside the words, to only the shifting inflections, you can attach your own meaning to the sounds.”

— Jeanine Cummins

88. “If there’s one good thing about terror, Lydia now understands, it’s that it’s more immediate than grief.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

90. “This street dead-ends in a fishbowl of concrete: a line of shops to the right, some formidable, blockish government buildings to the left, and a wall directly in front, which is topped with a second wall, which is topped with a third wall, which is topped with razor wire and mounted cameras. It’s behind this wall, stretching high up into the sky, that the American flag moves stiffly in the mild wind. Only a few feet away from it, on this side of the fence, a Mexican flag also flies.”

— Jeanine Cummins

91. “Padre nuestro, bless these children with your love and grace. Protect them from any further harm, God, and provide them with comfort in their time of unspeakable grief. May Jesus walk the road with them and repair their broken hearts. May Mother Mary sweep all dangers from their road ahead and lead them safely where they’re going. Padre nuestro, these two faithful servants have shouldered more than their share of life’s burdens already. Please, God, may you see fit to relieve them.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

93. “Lydia understands that it’s not a disguise at all. She and Luca are actual migrants. That is what they are. And that simple fact, among all the other severe new realities of her life, knocks the breath clean out of her lungs. All her life she’s pitied those poor people.”

— Jeanine Cummins

94. “And then Luca leans close and whispers something in the coyote’s ear. And the man reaches up and takes Luca in his arms, and Luca folds himself around the coyote’s neck, and they embrace for a long moment, and then they turn away from each other quickly, and Luca ascends the steps. Lydia watches through the window as El Chacal lifts his pack from one of the lawn chairs, hoists his replenished water supplies, and heads back into the desert.”

— Jeanine Cummins

95. “She could do anything back then, before she had maternal fear to spark any real caution in her soul.”

— Jeanine Cummins

96. “From the Author’s Note: In my conversations with Mexican people, I seldom heard the word American used to describe a citizen of this country – instead they use a word we don’t even have in English estadounidense, United States-ian.”

— Jeanine Cummins

97. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

99. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

100. “Hermana Cecilia’s voice is the most soothing sound Luca has ever heard, a peaceful, uninflected hum of determined protection, so that no matter what words she says, the words Luca hears are You are safe here, you are safe here, you are safe.”

— Jeanine Cummins