The Revolution of Every Day Quotes

“she thought maybe she’d be a rock star, but she just ended up another name on the very long list of people Lou Reed was rude to. Yeah,”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“Apartment windows are cracked open to the cold to balance overzealous radiators, and there's comfort in the sounds drifting out. Each window Amelia passes hints at the warmth inside: people talking, people laughing, kitchen sounds, the steady pulse of music. Now salsa, now reggae. Now opera, now rock. voices in English, in Spanish in Korean, in junkie gibberish. And she's a part of it, at least as long as the sounds of all those lives wash over her.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“Why are people willing to work so hard for the privilege of living in a dark little shoe box in a shitty tenement building? Do they ever think about what they could be doing if they didn’t have to work all the time? What they could be doing for themselves, their families, their community? What would this country be like if its people were freed from the yoke of the forty-, fifty-, sixty-hour workweek? What could they accomplish if housing weren’t bought, sold, rented, but was a right?”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“This is how history happens in America—desperate people crowded into a musty basement, ready to give themselves over to a lawyer who’s supposed to be their savior. In Amsterdam, when they heard the police were coming they barred the doors and took to the rooftops. They stockpiled bricks and stones. They prepared to fight. Here they talk and wring their hands, hoping pieces of paper will save them.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“She knew she was plain; she’d learned to pride herself on it. Her plainness, she reasoned, allowed her to pass through the world less subject to the male gaze—if not totally free of its burden, then at least not completely shackled by beauty.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“Fourteen years together and Anne still doesn’t speak much Spanish. You’d think she’d be a little curious, at least. Want to know what the inside of her husband’s head sounds like. If she lived half her life, dreamed more than half her dreams in some other language, he’d want to know. He’d want in.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“You've turned on us, New York. We who see your jagged-tooth skyline rise up and want to weep because we are so full of you. We who know that the tumbledown tenements are beautiful, that the cracked sidewalks are beautiful, that the iron and cobblestones, the soot and the stink are beautiful, that the tired old shoemakers are beautiful. That the bodega cats, the gutter rats, the endless clouds of pigeons are beautiful . . . We mourn for you, New York, because you are forgetting us, your brash and ragged children.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“Even the fiercest of anarchists lose their teeth to age.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day

“The sun rolls along up Fourteenth Street and the ghost of a habit turns Cat's face into the light. She shields her eyes and looks east, half expecting to see her father, a sun-blown shadow in the diorama box of his newsstand.”
― Cari Luna, The Revolution of Every Day