Top 150 Jeanine Cummins Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

107. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

110. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

114. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

116. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

118. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

129. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

131. “The noise thunders into her bones.”

— Jeanine Cummins

132. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

137. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

143. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

150. “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