Infinite Country Quotes
"The nuns believed silence a weapon, teaching the girls that only with it could they discover the depths of their interior without being servants to the temptations of this world."
"During the day, under the nuns’ watch, the girls practiced their downcast gazes."
"They listened for the nuns’ footsteps on the level below, sensing vibrations on the wooden floor planks; the search for rule breakers, disruptors their guardians would schedule for punishment at daybreak."
"One never knows who might be listening, especially in a quasi jail for minors, some of whom were murderers on the verge."
"She understood. Liberating herself from the prison, and the country, would be up to her."
"You’re not like other girls here," she began."
"But she had less than one week to get back to Bogotá, to the airport and out of Colombia."
"If you’d passed her in a car as she walked, small in her baggy captivity uniform, an expression more lost than determined, you might not have thought her a fugitive from the school for bad girls up the mountain, the place said to reform criminals in the making."
""A word of advice. Don’t ever tell a stranger you’ll go anywhere.""
"Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things."
"People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love."
"It’s not the country we want, but it’s the country we deserve."
"We’re Colombians. So is our daughter. It’s where we belong."
"For every deportation horror tale, there was another about someone receiving sudden amnesty, asylum, or a pardon so they could apply for residency, and they were filled with hope."
"Mauro passed time spinning bottles, flipping coins, pulling cards from a deck, searching for signs, a way to make the decision for his family to stay or to go."
"In Colombia people said a baby arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm. Where four eat, so can five."
"He promised, his head resting beside Elena’s deflated abdomen, the child swaddled and asleep in the plastic basinet next to the bed, that he would never drink again."
"Real love, her mother once told her, was proven only by endurance."
"She promised she would protect her from harm and felt nudges from within letting her know the baby had heard."
"Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be."
"The turn of the millennium showed no end to the violence. Elena knew in every war it was the innocents who paid."
"Since they came to the north, there were moments when Elena considered taking the children and leaving him. But she convinced herself every woman experiences the same temptation."
"If there was a time to return home, Elena thought, it was now, but in the past two weeks alone, a car bomb ignited at an elite social club frequented by government officials just blocks from the house in Chapinero, killing thirty-six, the deadliest attack the country had seen in years."
"Trust no one. Trust only family, if you’ve got family to trust."
"In the prison school, Talia lay on her bunk at night running films across her inner lids: images of her mother’s face, scenes from her life in the north, a life that would soon be hers too."
"We are only soil and water baked in the sun to dry. Is it any wonder we are so fragile and destined to break?"
"The memory of her visit will come to you in the future. Be patient."
"What were you doing in Barichara? Seeing some of my country before I leave it."
"The antidote to disgrace, according to even the atheists in the group, was humility and prayer."
"I feel her. I feel she’s with me. I feel her love."
"She doubted her decision every day since, telling herself she never should have sent her baby away."
"What Elena did not realize was the bridge had dissolved behind her."
"The price of being able to work to provide for the rest of the family was their estrangement."
"That night: white-breath cold, shop windows scalloped in frost, the town tinseled for the holidays."
"Amiga, I’m sorry to say these things happen all the time. Try to forget it."
"You can love the United States of Diasporica and still be afraid of it."
"It’s kind of amazing how rapidly language is diluted if not altogether lost, quicker than memories."
"The pursuit of peace is the only way to give those who died a proper funeral."
"The day after the last election, some kids came skipping into homeroom like a war was won."
"I’ve wondered if he remembers these things as often and as intensely as I do."
"That’s when I realized rich kids make for great criminals."
"She was satisfied with this, and the next time I saw the school shrink, I told her my mother said not to bother her at home anymore with stuff I can deal with myself."
"She helped me into bed and went to prepare me some caldo de pollo. I couldn’t tell her the truth."
"I remember wondering what it must feel like to belong to American whiteness and to know you can do whatever you want because nobody you love is deportable."
"Our bodies were made for this climate. Do you think our ancestors had electric heaters?"
"Are you ready to leave this country knowing you might never be able to return?"
"Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much less than you had before."
"In the other country, she would no longer be a criminal. But in the other country half her family was and always would be."
"The sight of his daughter's empty room, those posters of gringo singers and bands she taped to the walls, would sting."
"I’m the only one with a driver’s license in our house, and Mom’s bosses are cool about letting me take out their Jeep since they hardly use it."
"What do you think it will be like when she gets here? We’ll have to look after her. Explain things. It might take a while for us to get used to each other."
"In matters of migration, even accidental, no option is more moral than another. There is only the path you make. Any other would be just as wrong or right."
"The unexpected harmony of russet buildings, avenues the color of shrapnel shining with recent rain."
"A sense of her life’s incompletion had led her this far, but now she wondered if she wasn’t meant to live anywhere but Bogotá."
"You can’t see what’s ahead if you keep looking in the rearview mirror."
"There was a new feeling. A coming to the end of something while knowing it was the beginning of something else."
"Memories she hoped to drop from the sky the minute her plane left their mountains and crossed the ocean."
"His eyes were dry, but she knew it was because he’d learned to cry without tears."
"How stupid she was to think leaving would be as easy as handing over her ticket and finding her seat on the plane."
"In the end that was also a beginning, there was recognition beyond features and gestures."
"Our family is whole now, but there is no day that passes without anxiousness that I may come home to find my mother or father have been taken into custody."
"I didn’t let myself watch their entire exchange. I went to our living room, where my brother was sketching faces, and watched him until our mother and sister returned to the cottage."