Top 150 Jeanine Cummins Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

103. “It’s all a romantic dream now. It’s over. I made my choices long ago, and this is where they’ve led me.”

— Jeanine Cummins

104. “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.”

— Jeanine Cummins

105. “He knows stability is the key, and he wants peace.”

— Jeanine Cummins

106. “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

107. “The noise thunders into her bones.”

— Jeanine Cummins

108. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

119. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

129. “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

130. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

136. “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

137. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins