América del Norte Quotes

“Because in America I can be my own person.” “I think you want to stay in America for the same reason you want to stay with Lee. You want to stop being a creole. You want to become white.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“I saw with perfect clarity that none of it was preordained, that none of it was necessary, that the destruction of all those lives had been the product of a choice, a conscious one, made by a handful of hateful people empowered by a hateful nation and carried out by an army of uninformed nobodies who had credit card bills to pay.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“History is not epic but tragic. It is, at best, the systematic organization of regrets.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“There is an old adage that says every people has the rulers it deserves. I would add that every government has the criminals it breeds.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“He understands the bitter pleasure of picking at old wounds but also the wild joy of willful forgetting.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Don't fall prey to American anti-intellectualism.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“The dream of a united North America was forever lost. The two nations were never joined, neither in marriage nor by conquest, and instead remained divided by a line - so thin as to be invisible, so stark as to be impassable - that cut not just across the land, but also through the heart. It should come as no surprise that love between their children became impossible.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“But to believe one’s fantasies is the definition of madness.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“would have never happened if you weren’t Mexican. For the simple reason that you wouldn’t be together if you weren’t Mexican. More to the point, you wouldn’t be who you are if you weren’t Mexican—just like she wouldn’t be who she is if she weren’t American.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Can we please stop? Or do you want me to ask about how you’ve only dated American girls? Is it that we know how to fuck? That we didn’t get brainwashed into frigidity by Catholicism and machismo?”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“liked him because he was a great dancer. And because he could be very kind when he wanted to. And because he was beautiful and good in bed. And because he could show me all kinds of new things about a culture and a place that fascinated me.” “But not because he was brown.” “What are you getting at, Sebastián?”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Look,” Lee said. “I’m sorry that Susan said something stupid. I’m sorry that I said something stupid—and that I continue to say stupid things. Like just now. Please, can you tell me what was so upsetting about what I said?”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“The most powerful government on earth is imprisoning children and we are arguing semantics?” “I don’t know if you got the memo, Sebástian, but this is a writing workshop. Semantics are fair game.” “What would you call them instead?”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Never mind the bookseller: she had just stood up a group of people who very much resembled the working-class women who populated the books that had made her famous. Maybe there’s an”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Where paranoia is diffuse, terror is concrete: the butt of a rifle, the texture of ropes tightening around one’s wrists, the desecrated body of a loved one, an empty field by a river. Such is the way of the world: the rich write novels; the poor just die. Laurel de victoria, sepulcro de”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“My father’s classmates then applied for student visas, just like mine, and flocked to the great universities of the United States, where they discovered the lucid beauty of quantitative economics. What a rush it must have been to realize the alchemical secret to turning shit into gold was written in the language of interest rates!”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Freud for fun, can design complex statistical models, speaks fluent Spanish, English, Italian, and Zapotec,”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“At the very least, a cultured person ought to be able to produce a proof of the Pythagorean theorem from memory.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“speaking Nahuatl was laughable; the project of building a church on a hill where pagans worshipped the mother goddess Tonantzin, borderline heretic. Juan Diego went home dejected. But”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“But how can I be sure you don’t think I’m a philistine and are telling me lies to keep me away? You wouldn’t even let me crash with”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“I’m an upper-middle-class half-Asian girl from the suburbs of Chicago. My parents are doctors! I went to Dart-mouth! There is nothing interesting about that!”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“The Middle West was a terrible place and America was going to the dogs, but now at least I wouldn’t drink alone.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“The few articles I’d read made it clear that Trump’s voters weren’t just resentful old men in coal-mining backwaters but also respectable professionals, tech millionaires, nice ladies who hosted garden parties in the suburbs—even, as I’d just discovered, college students.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“didn’t miss Mexico, and I resented the suggestion that this lack of nostalgia meant that something was wrong with me, when the opposite was true: nostalgia was a disease; its absence, a sign of health.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“Have you converted to Protestantism? Given up gluten? Sworn allegiance to the Stars and Stripes?” “Whatever. Poison the preschoolers.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“college, however, all Mexicans, even those of unmixed European ancestry, were metaphysically brown. The proposition was absurd, but so was race-thinking in general: in America a single drop of non-European blood meant one would never be truly white; in Mexico every additional drop of European blood made one progressively whiter.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte

“The dreamwork allowed Mexicans to convince themselves that the Americans had defeated them not because they were worthier but merely because they were stronger. But to believe one’s fantasies is the definition of madness.”
― Nicolás Medina Mora, América del Norte