The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“After seventeen years of ferrying people through the desert, he’s learned to tell the good from the bad, even in difficult circumstances. He understands that once in a while, a person is not worth saving.” (American Dirt Quotes)
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Because fear and corruption work in tandem to censor the people who might otherwise discover the clues that would point to justice. There will be no evidence, no due process, no vindication.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“For all her love of words, at times they’re entirely insufficient.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“He seemed enlightened. But like every drug lord who’s ever risen to such a rank, he was also shrewd, merciless, and ultimately delusional. He was a vicious mass murderer who mistook himself for a gentleman. A thug who fancied himself a poet.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“He wants to plead not guilty by reason of grief. She knows grief is a kind of insanity. She knows.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Her body feels like cracked glass, already shattered, and held in place only by a trick of temporary gravity. One wrong move and she will come to pieces.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“I only meant because sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“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 still happen serves to anesthetize her from the worst of the anguish.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“It’s hard to feel inconspicuous when you’re a stranger in a small place.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“It’s none of my business, I know. But of course it makes me curious. Sometimes money is cause for concern. Especially here. Especially when it’s a young person who has a lot of money without having a job or a rich family.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Lydia and Luca will travel with Soledad and Rebeca for as long as possible has not been detailed aloud, yet it’s an arrangement all four of them intuitively understand. So much has happened that each hour of this journey feels like a year, but there’s something more than that. It’s the bond of trauma, the bond of sharing an indescribable experience together. Whatever happens, no one else in their lives will ever fully comprehend the ordeal of this pilgrimage, the characters they’ve met, the fear that travels with them, the grief and fatigue that eat at them. Their collective determination to keep pressing north. It solders them together so they feel like an almost-family now.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Lydia thinks about how adaptable migrants must be. They must change their minds every day, every hour. They must be stubborn about one thing only: survival.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Please, please listen. Never be complacent. Never assume you’re safe on this train. No one is safe, do you understand? No one. Machismo will get you killed.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“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. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“She doesn’t rebuke herself for thinking it; she does herself the small kindness of forgiving her malfunctioning logic.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“She feigns confidence in the way all mothers know how to do in front of their children. She wears the fierce maternal armor of deceit.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“She was a book lover who enjoyed reading aloud to her baby. She liked the idea that, even before he understood them, he might begin with the most beautiful words, that he’d build language from a foundation of literature and poetry.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Someone once told me that the only good advice for grief is to stay hydrated. Because everything else is just chingaderas.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“The worst will either happen or not happen, and there’s no worry that will make a difference in either direction.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“There aren’t many women on La Bestia, and very few children, so Lydia feels noticed by every single man they see. She’s aware that she and her companions represent something to these men. They look like home. Or they look like salvation. Or they look like prey. To an halcón they might look like reward money.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“There’s a blessing in the moments after terror and before confirmation.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“This is a grueling journey. Two and a half nights of arduous hiking, and I am your only lifeline. If there’s any problem with that, or if you don’t think you can make it, this is your last chance to say so.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“This is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
“Trauma waits for stillness. Lydia feels like a cracked egg, and she doesn’t know if she’s the shell or the yolk or the white. She is scrambled.”
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
