Top 150 Jeanine Cummins Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “On the trains, a uniform seldom represents what it purports to represent.”

— Jeanine Cummins

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

105. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

122. “That love is so vast I sometimes fear it,” he said. “I can never hope to earn it, so I fear it will disappear, it will consume me. And at the same time, it’s the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

— Jeanine Cummins

123. “Move north. Reach the border. Find a coyote. Get across. Take a bus to Denver. There will be churches there. Libraries, internet access, immigrant communities. People willing to help. For now just move north, move north. Get Luca out of danger.”

— Jeanine Cummins

124. “The caffeine hits her bloodstream like a dream of another life.”

— Jeanine Cummins

125. “Her body has become unused to electric comforts.”

— Jeanine Cummins

126. “Beto is afraid of turning eleven, because it feels like a treachery to his brother. “But I guess it would be worse to not turn eleven, right?”

— Jeanine Cummins

127. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

128. “There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit. There were grief and ruins, and you were the miracle.”

— Jeanine Cummins

129. “Only one out of three will make it to your destination alive. Will it be you?” He points at a man in his fifties with a neatly trimmed beard and a fresh T-shirt.”

— Jeanine Cummins

130. “It’s a luxury to slough the dust of the road off your skin, to soap up and stand beneath a spray of warm water, to watch it pool at your feet, grimy and brown, before it circles the drain and disappears forever.”

— Jeanine Cummins

131. “His shadow makes the shape of grief as he hurtles toward the earth.”

— Jeanine Cummins

132. “It was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him; he didn’t press her on personal matters, he was seldom jealous, and he had no interest in annexing or directing her friendships with other men.”

— Jeanine Cummins

133. “So we’re leaving today, Papi. We are already gone. And you must be very careful and look after yourself, please. We are taking you with us in our hearts, and we will call you when we get to el norte, Papi. And we’ll send for you when we have jobs, and you can come to us, and you can bring Mami and Abuela, too, and we will all be together again as it is meant to be.”

— Jeanine Cummins

134. “The depth of her feeling surprises her, because how can she have any leftover grief available for other people, for Paola’s murdered nephew? But there it is – an anguish that makes her feel hollow in the bones, despair for a beautiful boy Lydia never met.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

136. “It’s as subtle and significant as a heartbeat.”

— Jeanine Cummins

137. “So Lydia grew up with a mother who emphasized the importance of being independent and saving for the future.”

— Jeanine Cummins

138. “Despite everything, he likes being alive.”

— Jeanine Cummins

139. “It’s a common tactic for bad actors to ride the trains posing as migrants, working to gain the trust of unsuspecting travelers, so they can lure them into a secluded place where they can commit some violence against them.”

— Jeanine Cummins

140. “She can’t even imagine how this loss will shape the person Luca becomes. They need to do a funeral ceremony as soon as they’re safe. Luca will need a ritual, a method of fashioning his grief into a thing he can exert some small control over.”

— Jeanine Cummins

141. “Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.”

— Jeanine Cummins

142. “She fights at every moment against the scream that pulses inside her like a living thing.”

— Jeanine Cummins

143. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

144. “She doesn’t ask if he’s okay, because from now on that question will carry a weight of painful absurdity.”

— Jeanine Cummins

145. “He can prolong the moment of irrational hope that maybe some sliver of yesterday’s world is still intact.”

— Jeanine Cummins

146. “She learns that there are flags people use here, and those flags may be a warning or a welcome.”

— Jeanine Cummins

147. “One of the very first bullets comes in through the open window above the toilet where Luca is standing.”

— Jeanine Cummins

148. “There are all different kinds of crazy, but mostly I think it’s ancestral. Sometimes you can even trace it back along the dead branches of your family tree; you can find evidence in family anecdotes or documents. A sepia-stained photograph. A diary. You might think you’ve escaped its reach – you might think you’re okay. Because it can lie dormant like a tumor, until some gentle, private trauma pushes it loose inside you.”

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

150. “His grief is not the same as hers.”

— Jeanine Cummins