People From Sacramento

"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."

"As destitute as it was, San Francisco Tlalco was not the worst of the barrios in Sarmiento's district. At the edges of San Antonio Abad were massive garbage heaps scavenged by entire families who lived on-site in huts constructed of plywood and tin. In other neighbourhoods, slop jars filled with human excrement were left on the roadways, where they were intermittently collected by the leaky night soil carts that rumbled through the dirt streets. One evening at dusk, he saw dozens of men, women, and children walk out of the city into the far distant fields, where, having nowhere else to sleep, they bedded down on the earth. He saw the decaying carcasses of burros, dogs, and cats left in streets where the city's garbage collectors refused to venture; fountains that gushed slime the people used for drinking, cooking, and cleaning; and malnourished infants at the breasts of skeletal mothers. Sarmiento had never systematically examined his attitudes toward the poor, but he did so now. He observed, as if recording the results of an experiment, his disgust as well as his pity, his superficial identification with the poor as a matter of their common humanity, and his profounder feeling of superiority to them. In the end, he felt anger. How, he wondered, could the poor persist in habits and customs that experience alone must have taught them were detrimental to their health and moral well-being? Why else, for example, would the men squander their pittances at filthy pulquerias while their women and children went ragged and hungry? But then rationality overcame emotion. Every human was born ignorant, he reasoned, and their habits and understanding were shaped by their environment. How could he reasonably expect those born into a cesspool from which there was no escape to acquire the habits of someone like him, born by comparison into a palace? He could not. Therefore, he concluded, his attitude toward the poor should be one of humility and understanding, not superiority or condemnation. He must meet the poor on their own ground."

"While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity."

"The harsh emphasis on sinfulness that she heard elsewhere in the city's churches was absent in Padre Cáceres's homilies. Instead, he spoke of fallibility and forgiveness and the passionate, unchanging and ever-present love of Jesus for his people whatever they did and in whatever circumstances they found themselves. At the end of each Mass, before the final blessing, he always reminded them that while Moses had given the Hebrews ten commandments, Jesus had promulgated only two: "Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as you love yourself. Children, that is the whole Gospel.""

"I refer you, sir, to the work of Sir Francis Galton," King said. "England's preeminent eugenist. Galton points out, and quite correctly, that if the morally and physically enfeebled are allowed to reproduce themselves, humanity will be dragged down." "Even allowing that that is true, there are enfeebled individuals of every race, Señor King. Even among white Americans." "But it is true that our Indians seem utterly impervious to self-improvement. Surely your decade at the department has demonstrated that over and over." "It is difficult to assess the Indian's capacity for self-improvement since he is never offered the opportunity for it," Sarmiento said. "He is forced to take the worst and lowest-paying jobs, eat food unfit for human consumption, drink putrid water, and live in squalor. His children must work rather than attend school, assuming there is a school available to them, and he is caught between the church and the pulqueria, one offering the false panacea of a future heaven and the other the false panacea of intoxication to console him for his present misery. That's what I have learned in my ten years at the department."

"You're a fine one to talk about motherhood," Eulalia replied. "You expelled your children from your womb directly into Swiss boarding schools."

"..."a male with a woman's psyche"..."

"[Alicia, with Miguel] "As long as the poor are regarded as expendable parts of the machinery of the economy, they will continue to be ground into the dust." "The Lord said the poor will always be with us," she murmured. "One reason I am not a Christian," he replied. "Your Jesus should have spent less time teaching the poor to accept their lot and more time teaching the rich to share.""

"Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks."

"[Jorge Luis] "It is my nature to love other men, Miguel. That may disgust you, but that night I decided I would no longer allow it to disgust me. It no longer does. I am at peace with myself." "Once I made that decision," Luis continued, "remarkable events occurred.""

"Come on, then," Gustavo said. "Let's get the circus started."

"He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural."

"But something terrible had happened - she had become old. The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs."

"[Jorge Luis] "I am a man like other men who love and suffer. Do I love Ángel? Yes, I love him. Do I suffer because of it? Yes. I suffer because my love for him must remain a secret and our life together enshrouded in lies." He swigged the pulque. "Can you imagine living in a world where there is no place in the sun for you, Miguel? Only a few rat holes like this one.""

"Abuelita," he said, groping for words to frame his thought. "Was today history?" "History is simply the passage of time, José, so we are in history at every moment."

"My father was a man of many sayings," Sarmiento replied. "And one of them was "A mas honor, mas dolor." No risk, no reward."

""War is destruction and destruction is easy," Madero said."

"Sarmiento waited for Luis at a sidewalk table at the Cafe Colón on the Reforma. Two sumptuous carriages filled with beautifully dressed women passed beneath Columbus's monument. They were the advance guard of the daily procession of the rich that wound its way up the boulevard and around Chapultepec in a stately and pointless show of opulence. Meanwhile, ragged Indian men swept the sidewalks with branch-and-twig brooms, bent over at their labour and ignored by the passers-by. The distance between the silk women and the pauper Indians was the true history of México, Sarmiento thought."

"[Madero] "An eye for an eye ends in blindness.""

"[Jorge Luis, to young José's mother] "You must help him accept his nature," Luis replied forcefully. "Do not let him do as I did and stumble for years in the darkness trying to make sense of his feelings and his shame. Can you do that, Alicia?""

"Madero focussed his magnetic gaze on Sarmiento. "Arresting Huerta would not have solved the problem because the problem is not Huerta, it's the army. Huerta's replacement would have also schemed behind my back and his replacement and his replacement. Don't you understand, Miguel? Until the army finally submits to civilian control, México will never be a real democracy. The army must stop thinking of itself as a branch of the government. Its generals must stop thinking of themselves as presidents-in-waiting. Until then, México will be condemned to repeat the last one hundred years of coups, countercoups, civil wars, and military dictatorships until Jesus arrives in the glory of his second coming and puts an end to it.""

"The fighting had ended and his old routines had begun to be re-established ‑ even El Morito had reappeared, skinny and flea-ridden - but nothing was as it had been. He was like someone who had stepped into a long, dark, and frightening tunnel and, coming into the light, could not blink away the darkness that continued to cloud the periphery of his vision. The world was a more arbitrary and crueler place, and even though his family surrounded him, he knew now that he was essentially alone in it."

"In my father's house are many dwellings. Is that what Jesus had meant? Was he speaking not only of heaven but of this life in which each person carved out of the vast, unified reality of existence the little houses of personality they inhabited? She had a vision of children making sand houses at the edge of the sea and of waves gently spilling over and eradicating them. The little sand houses were like the houses of self, and the waves were the fingers of God drawing the sand back into himself."

"[Alicia] "What is false does not become true simply because people shout it. What is right does not change because it is inconvenient.""

"Since then, however, his city had disintegrated around him, shattered buildings and the glassy-eyed dead transforming familiar landscapes into a circle of hell. He had felt the fear of the adults whom he had once believed were impervious to fear and invincible in their certainties. The world had taught him there are no certainties and ultimately no safety. Terrible things happened without warning or explanation. He blinked back his tears. He was not yet a man, at least not like his father or Tió Damian, but he could no longer be a child. He felt the world's enmity and he responded not with a child's grief but a man's defiance, as if his blood were being infiltrated with threads of iron."

"This struggle is not about sex. It is about privacy, individuality, and civil equality and the right of all Americans, not just gay and lesbian Americans, to be free."