Top 40 Luis Alberto Urrea Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Numbers never lie, after all: they simply tell different stories depending on the math of the tellers.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

2. “Laughter is a virus that infects you with humanity.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

3. “Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

4. “Words are the only bread we can really share.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

5. “There is a minute in the day, a minute for everyone, though most everyone is too distracted to notice its arrival. A minute of gifts coming from the world like birthday presents. A minute given to every day that seems to create a golden bubble available to everyone.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

6. “The world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

7. “If only Mexico paid their workers a decent wage.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

8. “From the beginning, the highway has always lacked grace-those who worship desert gods know them to favor retribution over the tender dove of forgiveness. In Desolation, doves are at the bottom of the food chain. Tohono O’Odham poet Ofelia Zepeda has pointed out that rosaries and Hail Marys don’t work out here. “You need a new kind of prayers,” she says “to negotiate with this land.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

9. “Death is alive, they whispered. Death lives inside life, as bones dance within the body. Yesterday is within today. Yesterday never dies.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

10. “Families came apart and regrouped, she thought. Like water. In this desert, families were the water.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

11. “That is the prize: to realize, at the end, that every minute was worth fighting for with every ounce of blood and fire.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

12. “Spanish! His family didn’t even like speaking Spanish to him. He tried, and they insisted on answering him in English. Though they knew perfectly well that he spoke Spanish as well as they did and better than their children did. Each side had something to prove, and none of them knew what it was.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

13. “If you were born to be a nail, you had to be hammered.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

14. “Even Ignatius Loyola wavered. That dark night of the soul, man. No one’s immune. It would all be meaningless if you didn’t wonder and doubt. That’s what makes it real. That’s what makes us people. God could have sent angels to flutter around like fairies, delivering rum punch and manna all day on a cosmic cruise ship. But what would that avail us?”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

15. “No wonder Americans seemed crazy to everybody else – they were utterly alone in the vastness of this ridiculously immense land. They all skittered about, alighting and flying off again like frantic butterflies. Looking for – what? What were they looking for?”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

16. “The sky peeled back for a moment, and a weak ray of sunset spilled over the scene like the diseased eye of some forgetful god – the light bearing with it cold in place of heat.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

17. “I can’t believe how many students don’t read. They want to be writers, but they haven’t read anything at all. They have looked at book covers, which usually allows them enough expertise to sneer, but they haven’t read the books. How many young poets “don’t like” poetry? How many fiction writers don’t know Lehane from Nevada Barr?”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

18. “Why was he thinking about work? About the past? It was over. It was all over. He was never going to work again. “This second,” his father liked to tell him, “just became the past. As soon as you noticed it, it was already gone. Too bad for you, Son. It’s lost forever.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

19. “The world looked to them like a great roll of butcher paper unfurled on a table.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

20. “Each of the women elaborately ignored the other.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

21. “Everybody knew that being dead could put you in a terrible mood.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

22. “Back at the house. How could you end a whole era and bury a century of life and be home before suppertime? Big Angel could not reconcile himself to this dirty deal they had all been dealt. Death. What a ridiculous practical joke. Every old person gets the punch line that the kids are too blind to see. All the striving, lusting, dreaming, suffering, working, hoping, yearning, mourning, suddenly revealed itself to be an accelerating countdown to nightfall.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

23. “It was as if a dump truck had spilled a ton of humanity into the yard. Bodies were jammed onto the patio, elbowing gently to get at the new macaroni salad and ignoring the mustard coleslaw.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

24. “When you died, you died in small doses. You had trouble speaking. You forgot who was beside you. You were suddenly furious and in a panic of outrage. You wished you could be saintly. You wished you weren’t so weak. You suddenly felt better and fooled yourself into believing that a miracle was about to happen. Well, wasn’t that all a dirty rotten thing to pull on somebody.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

25. “These children are so stupid; they think they are the first to discover the world.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

26. “To my dogs,” he announced, “I am a legend.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

27. “Big Angel was late to his own mother’s funeral.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

28. “Don Pepe was a Mexican man: a fatalist. He meant to impart much more than comfort. He meant that all good things would also end. All joy would crumble. And death would visit each and every one of them. He meant that regimes and ancient orders and cultures would all collapse. The world as we know it becomes a new world overnight.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

29. “Miguel Angel,” he said, “It isn’t hard to die. Everybody does it. Even flies do it. Everyone here is doing it. We’re all terminal.” He had a tear in his eye; Big Angel could see it brimming. “Your schedule is just different from mine.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

30. “They breathed. They felt their lungs fill the sky, and they let the dark clouds inside them flow out. Then they connected to the earth.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

31. “There were other things, though. There were always more details trailing any good story. Like tin cans on the back bumper of a newlywed’s car. Rattles and pings and wonderful small moments spinning in the wake of a great life.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

32. “This ain’t what we are, homes,” Lalo says. “This is not us. This is the story they tell about us, but it’s not true.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

33. “Roses denote grace.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

34. “Big Angel didn’t speak, just beamed like some small lighthouse.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

35. “Who was to say that God did not use the coyote’s teeth to eat His gifts?”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

36. “Big Angel had never noticed his mother’s endowment before. Suddenly, she seemed to be blessed with an expanse of pillowy flesh. And she tucked the parrot into that cleavage, adjusting herself as it sank from view, finishing the operation by using her thumb on its head to get it well positioned in the shadows. She adjusted her bust and said, “Let’s go to San Diego, boys!”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

37. “By the time he realized he was nowhere near Target, he was lost in a housing tract apparently formed entirely of cul-de-sacs.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

38. “In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

39. “He believed he was celebrating them when he shared stories of their foibles. He felt the burden of being their living witness. Somehow the silliest details of their days were, to him, sacred. And he believed that if only the dominant culture could see these small moments, they would see their own human lives reflected in the other.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

40. “Doesn’t every town in America have an old-timer called The Professor? That duffer who knows everything and everybody, as long as they are dead.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

41. “That irked the crap out of him, but maybe that’s just what happens when you get old. Everything’s so damned irksome.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

42. “The border remains a fluid, mutating, stubbornly troubling, enthusiastically lethal region. Perhaps it’s not a region at all. Maybe it’s just an idea nobody can agree on. A conversation that never ends, even when it becomes an argument and all participants kick over the table and spill their drinks and stomp out of the room. I was born there.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

43. “She learned that women were braver than men. Braver and stronger. She learned that she herself could one day stretch open as wide as a window, and it would not kill her.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

44. “Some of the women, it must be said, had not yet accepted the idea that a woman could be Municipal President. They had been told that they were moody and flighty and illogical and incapable for so long that they believed these things.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea