Michael Nava

"It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific."

"[Zack Bowen] "Damn, it's tough being a fag. People hate you who don't even know you, and the ones who know you, they're worse.""

"[Josh Mandel] "Most things people care about are silly. They don't think about the ones that matter.""

"It was sometimes easier to read the future from the entrails of a cat than get a fix on what a judge was thinking, and Torres-Jones was particularly hard to get a handle on."

"Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide."

"[Henry Rios] "We never know anyone as well as we think we do.""

"[Alex] "I never knew how many ways there were to fail until I moved here.""

"[Inez] "...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications.""

"[Henry] Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?"

"[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives.""

"[Alex] Big ideas don't pay the rent."

"[Donati] "You couldn't have planned a worse place to put a city than LA.""

"[Asuras] "There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing.""

"[Henry] "...when you start running from yourself, you end up in some pretty dark places.""

"[Henry, to Rod] "Hell's not a place, Rod, it's something people do to each other.""

"[Elena] "My God is not an unpleasant old man who lives in the sky and forces people to make desperate choices and then condemns them if they get it wrong. For me, God is the clear inner voice that guides us to the choices that are right for us, if we're willing to listen. The choices are different for everyone.""

"[Dr Hayward, to Henry Rios after his heart attack] "You're still a relatively young man. You'll be around for a while. Make the best of it, Henry. Live every moment as fully as you can, even if all you're doing is eating a bowl of soup.""

"The isolation that was so much a part of the city's psyche, the feeling that its ten million people were all living parallel lives that never intersected"

"[John, to Henry] "Here's your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion — you sure it's okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?" "If it's not," I said, biting into the hot dog, "I'll die a happy man.""

"[John, about children] "Mostly, you have to listen and try to hear what they're really telling you and remember that, half the time, they don't know themselves.""

"[Henry, to Vicky] "I know you think homosexuality is a sin, but that's because you've been taught by ignorant people.""

"[John] "I tell you, Henry, I did not want to grow up. I figured if I grew up, I would stop having fun." "Something change your mind?" "No. I was right! You do stop having fun, or maybe the things that were fun when you were a kid stop being fun. For a while I just did 'em more, faster, harder, trying to get the fun back, but it didn't work.""

"He laughed, but then in a serious voice said, "I have my slips. You gotta know that about me." "Anyone who has standards has slips, John. Only good people worry about being good.""

"[Dr Hayward, to Henry, after his heart attack] "Sex is not going to kill you — well, let me amend that. Safe sex is not going to kill you.""

"It had that unnatural stillness of a place where people feared to venture outside. "You better come in before someone tries to kill you," she said. "Did you lock your car?" "Yeah. It has an alarm." "That won't stop anyone around here." "Bad gang problem?" "When I was raising my kids, they used to play out in the streets. You see any kids out there now?""

"[Henry] "Maybe she hasn't learned yet that good people can make terrible mistakes and still be good people.""

"This is my life, I thought, these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops."

"[Henry, to Tony Earl] "I'll argue self-defense." "You do that," he said, "but last time I looked at the jury instructions on self-defense, if someone comes at you with fists you don't get to blow their brains out with a semiautomatic." "You can if his fists can kill you," I said."

"[Elena, about daughter] "Now I understand that it isn't up to her to be who I might want her to be. It's up to me to love her for who she is.""

"All I knew about his life was that he had had the kind of childhood that turns people into psychological time bombs. How would I react when he started to go off? Did I have my own time bomb ticking away in me?"

"He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands."

"After he left, the three of us sat on a bench worn to the wood by all the fidgeting bottoms that had occupied it before us."

"[Henry, to Elena, about Angel] "Remember when Edith called him an invulnerable? I've figured out that what that means isn't that things don't hurt him, but that they don't stop him.""

"You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?" "This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights."

"Patricia Ryan was a tall, beautiful woman about whom many stories were told, some of them true."

"... the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say."

"[Elena] "Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error.""

"I had formed my stereotype of evangelists from channel-surfing through the Sunday morning religious shows: white Southern men in expensive suits, with brittle, poufy hair and faces slimed theatrically with tears as they condemned people like me to the crude hells they constructed out of ignorance and fear. Sometimes the face was black, and instead of tears was frowning sternness, but the condemnation was always the same and it was animated by that purposeful energy of hatred. I expected Ortega to be the same kind of shrieker and weeper, and assumed the best I could hope for was that Leviticus was not this week's text."

"[John] "You don't stop loving your kids because they fuck up," he said. "You love them more.""

"[Miguel Sarmiento] "The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects.""

"[Alicia Gavilán] She had learned to distinguish between her personal thoughts and those thoughts that came to her like messages from a deeper source than her own personality. These deeper messages were sometimes consoling, but more often they had a challenging and unsettling quality. Her first impulse was always to resist them [...]. Yet as always happened, the thought simply repeated itself until she was forced to examine her reasons for rejecting it."

"[Miguel Sarmiento, to Alicia] "I do not wish to be disrespectful of your beliefs, but in my view religion is no more than superstition, a way to explain natural phenomena for which there are now rational and scientific explanations. Those superstitions may have served their purpose once, but their time has passed. The longer they persist, the more pernicious they become. ""

"[Alicia Gavilán, to Miguel] "We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing.""

"[Her elderly mother, to Alicia] "Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die.""

"The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father's tiny script."

"[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life.""

"The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary."

"[Alicia, with Miguel] "I do what I can to be faithful to Christ's admonition to love God and to love my neighbour. Nothing else matters." "To love God," he repeated. "How can you love a phantom?" "Because he is not a phantom to me. I perceive him in the scent of the flowers and the sun's warmth on my face. Do you truly not feel at this moment a benign and loving presence?" "Only yours," he said."

"He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries."

"[Padre Cáceres, to Miguel Sarmiento] "Poor people are not simply a set of diseases or potential diseases, Señor Doctor. They are human souls. If you wish to change their habits, you must learn what those habits are and why they have acquired them. You must meet the people.""