The Barbarian Nurseries Quotes

“Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“This is still the central tension in Latinx life. Between the idea that we might one day be full members in the club called the United States of America, with all the privileges that entails, and the reality of a society with deep class divisions that grow wider every year.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“When the prosecutor had finished, Ruthy Bacalan rose to begin her cross-examination. She was dressed in her own idiosyncratic version of summer courtroom dress: a white jacket with gold-braided epaulets on the shoulders, and wide white pants and white sandals, an outfit that suggested she had come to represent a defendant being brought on trial before the captain of a luxury cruise liner.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“Quickly he arrived at a broad outline of what the mayor might say—the trick, as always, was to make an essentially moderate and cautious position sound bold, principled, and eloquent, a skill all great American politicians possessed going back to Lincoln.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“Araceli could see the Special Friend and Councilman Luján were standing on opposite sides of Mexican history, even as they stood in the United States.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries

“Araceli imagined communal sleeping arrangements, bullying twelve-year-old proto-psychopaths, and cold macaroni and cheese without salt.”
― Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries