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

102. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

104. “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

105. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

110. “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

111. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

121. “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

122. “Sumac and mountain mahogany band together.”

— Jeanine Cummins

123. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

136. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Jeanine Cummins

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

— Jeanine Cummins

150. “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