The Tortilla Curtain Quotes

“There are always surprises. Life may be inveterately grim and the surprises disproportionately unpleasant, but it would be hardly worth living if there were no exceptions, no sunny days, no acts of random kindness.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

“He thought of Christ with his cross and his crown of thorns and wondered who had it worse.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

“But as he lay there watching the sparks climb into the sky, the wine infesting his veins, he knew how it was going to be, how it had to be, knew he would follow her into that hut and slap his own pain out of her, and that was so sick and so bad he wanted nothing more in that moment than to die.

But then dead men didn't work either, did they?”
― T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

“At first, she was disappointed, but she was patient, infinitely patient, rooted to the ground by the boredom of the days.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

“It was beyond irony, beyond questions of sin and culpability, beyond superstition: he couldn’t live in his own country and he couldn’t live in this one either.”
― T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

“We didn’t have jobs, not in any real sense—jobs were a myth, a rumor—so we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory’s mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A’s and B’s in the courses we took, and doled out A’s and B’s in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain