American Dirt Quotes
"It’s only luck that it doesn’t strike him between the eyes."
"It’s a victory to get out of Acapulco alive, Lydia knows this."
"It doesn’t matter that he’s killed fewer children than other murderers have. It’s not a moderation born of virtue. It’s a pinche business decision."
"Lydia has seen outspoken widows before, widows made brave by their anguish."
"Lydia knows she’s increased their chances of survival. She needs to take encouragement where she can find it."
"Lydia can’t make the word fit him. But that’s what they are now. This is how it happens."
"Lydia sits back in her chair and looks at her boy, who’s staring at a reclining fuchsia figure hovering on the wall above his head."
"I just want to get Luca out of here. I have to."
"But he quickly outstripped her knowledge of the language, and then they proceeded to learn together."
"The further she gets away from it, the more fanciful it seems. How could he have been so silent for all those years? And then, how could he have started talking like that?"
"Her boy was perfect—so smart and accomplished, so guapo and happy."
"The possible manners of death available on La Bestia are all gruesome."
"Half the people pretending to be migrants or coyotes or train engineers or police or la migra are working for the cartel. Everybody’s on the take."
"Half a million people survive this journey every year. This will provide anonymity."
"No," she says again. Because she, the sensible, bookstore-owning, devoted mother-and-wife Lydia, is fighting with this new Lydia, the deranged Lydia."
"Would she appeal to his abandoned humanity, acknowledge his weird condolences, plead for their lives?"
"The small, brown handbag is the same one her mother has carried for literally as long as Lydia can remember."
"Go for the putter. That hole is an easy par three."
"That was more than a year and a half before she’d met Javier."
"Mexico was the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist, no safer than an active war zone."
"If you can go home again and make a life for yourself where you came from, if you can return there safely, I implore you: please do so now."
"I suppose fear has certain magical properties."
"Not everybody has a mami like you, all right? Some mothers don’t give a shit."
"Even before he read it and even with the anonymous byline, Javier, who read the article with his usual equanimity, presumed the article was the work of Lydia’s husband, whose journalistic expertise in the drug trade was well-known."
"He wondered if his love for Lydia had blinded him to the inevitability of it."
"Initially, he didn’t need to measure his response, because the article didn’t provoke much feeling in him."
"He understood immediately that there would be ramifications, that his relative anonymity was a thing of the past, that his liberty had been permanently compromised."
"The only thing that truly unsettled Javier was his speculation that Lydia, his dear Lydia, had betrayed his confidence with the poem."
"Lydia knew Javier as well as anyone knew him. His first response to the article was exactly as she’d predicted."
"She was a woman who had never been beautiful, but who took care to appear as if she might once have been."
"Javier’s wife had failed to sufficiently calm herself when their daughter, Marta, called from boarding school in Barcelona later that afternoon and destroyed her with the simplicity of a single question: Mamá, is it true?"
"Javier in the bookstore, Skyping with his daughter in Barcelona before an exam. Her apprehension, his fatherly encouragement."
"Lydia’s mind races to put the pieces together while the boy sicario talks."
"The first domino of her understanding teeters and falls."
"How presumptuous she’d been, how foolhardy! Of course she couldn’t account for every eventuality."
"Her body feels like cracked glass, already shattered, and held in place only by a trick of temporary gravity."
"Marta’s death changed everything, of course. It changed everything."
"Instead, she will walk, she will leave him behind, she will repeat the sixteen names of her murdered family."
"The rosary is a kind of tether, and if he clings to it tightly enough, it will preserve his connection to Abuela and Adrián, to all of them."
"Their collective determination to keep pressing north. It solders them together so they feel like an almost-family now."
"Luca’s heart feels like a flapping bird in his chest, like that time a sparrow accidentally flew into their apartment from the balcony and couldn’t find its way out again."
"Lydia’s mind is clear of all thoughts except running as she propels herself and Luca along the furrowed earth as quickly as their bodies can go."
"Despite everything he’s been through, or maybe also because of it, her boy has weighed the call of his conscience above the call of his own salvation."
"Your son is a very impressive young man," el comandante says.
"It’s deeply unsettling for Lydia to field a compliment from him."
"You seen any visitors?" the voice says. "Migrantes?"
"We have not seen anyone," she says. "We were outside all afternoon."
"I hope not," he says. "I like being alive."
"We made it," she whispers to her little sister.
"You don’t even piss or sneeze without my permission."
"My mother was murdered. My whole family was murdered by the cartel in Acapulco."
"I’m afraid we’re going to die. This money is the only way to save my son."
"It was my niece’s quinceañera. Yénifer."
"This money is the only way to save my son."
"I own a bookstore in Acapulco. Or I did. I guess I still do."
"It’s so big, the pain. It’s exponential."
"Her eyes are two lines, her mouth, a line."
"You keep fighting, little man. That’s the kind of mettle you’re going to need in el norte."
"You find yourself a coyote who says he will take you across without the right gear? Don’t fucking pay him."
"It feels impossible that any creature could survive in such a place."
"They all become perfectly motionless and silent."
"We are invisible... We are desert plants. We are rocks."
"The stillness is a kind of meditation all migrants must master."
"I won’t risk the whole group for one individual. So listen up, esto es importante. It’s life or death."
"For every wickedness, there is an equal and opposite possibility of redemption."
"I will survive... Because I still have Luca. I have Luca."
"Despite everything they’ve suffered, at this moment together, they’re full of something bigger than hope."