Enrique's Journey Quotes

I figure when I die, I can't take anything with me. So why not give?

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it.

He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".

There is a clear pattern in U.S. history: When we need labor, we welcome migrants. When we are in recession, we want them to leave.

There is a clear pattern in U.S. history: When we need labor, we welcome migrants. When we are in recession, we want them to leave.

Enrique will be left with his father, Luis, who has been separated from Lourdes for three years.

Of all native peoples in the contiguous United States, the peoples of these arid regions (The Hopi, the Navajo, the Tewa) have remained most admirably resilient, adhering to their lands, their languages, their spirituality, their food ways, and their plant knowledge. Up on the Colorado Plateau the Hopi continue to practice the Hopi Way, a spiritual lifestyle that does not strive for a specific outcome or product but rather is a journey, focused on what is learned along the way about their relationship to place and community.

Chiapas, he says, is 'a cemetary with no crosses, where people die without even getting a prayer.

Lourdes has decided. She will leave. She will go to the United States and make money and send it home. She will be gone for one year - less, with luck - or she will bring her children to be with her. It is for them she is leaving, she tells herself, but still she feels guilty.

One Honduran teenager I met in southern Mexico had been deported to Guatemala twenty-seven times. He said he wouldn't give up until he reached his mother in the United States.

(Mothers) They lose their children's love. Reunited, they end up in conflict homes. Too often, the boys seek out gangs to try to find the love they thought they would find with their mothers. Too often, the girls get pregnant and form their own families. In many ways, these separations are devastating Latino families. People are losing what they value the most.

During that time, in between train rides, they sleep in trees or by the tracks, they drink from puddles, they beg for food.