Sabrina & Corina Quotes

“Sometimes a person's unhappiness can make them forget they are a part of something bigger, something like a family, a people, even a tribe.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“She said people will find the loveliest part of you and try to make it ugly. And they will do anything to own that piece of you.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Grandma Estella used to bathe me there when I was younger, working my knees and elbow with a washcloth and Ivory soap. Once, I asked her why she needed to scrub so hard it hurt. "Because we are not dirty people," she had said. Later, when I asked Mama about it, she told me when Grandma Estella was a little girl, her own teachers called her a dirty Mexican and it never left her, the shame of dirt.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“I had an accident."
"Oh, no," said the girl, scooting closer to Doty and squeezing her hand. "I bet people say you're lucky it wasn't worse."
"As a matter of fact," said Doty, "no one says anything about it at all.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“But Doty felt white men treated her as something less than a full woman, a type of exotic object to display in their homes like a dead animal.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“As we drove home, I glanced at her worn-out face resting against the window and I felt something unknowable about Sabrina, some sadness at her core that moved between us like a sickness. Where did it come from? Or had it always been there, growing inside of her, filling her lungs with it's liquid weight. "Sabrina," I whispered, tapping her shoulder, but she was already asleep, and for the first time in my life, I missed someone sitting right beside me.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Ever feel like the land is swallowing you whole, Sierra? That all of this beauty is wrapped around you so tight it's like being in a rattlesnakes mouth?"
.....
My mother gives me a glance. "You will someday. Maybe it'll come later for you than it did for me. Children tend to do that. Marriage. Life. All these things.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“She said people will find the loveliest part of you and try to make it ugly. “And they will do anything,” she always said, “to own that piece of you.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina: Stories

“I can tell how sad I look. It's something in my eyes. There's this dull light inside them. I'm starting to wonder if it's always been there. If I looked that way before your father, when I was a teenager, or even a little girl...What happened to me that made me look so sad?...I get embarrassed. I kept wondering how many people recognized that sadness in me. Probably more than I'd like to know. But it changed...The world did. It became less urgent, somehow bigger, and I didn't worry so much about being loved.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“I thought of all the women my family had lost, the horrible things they'd witnessed, the acts they simply endured. Sabrina had become another face in a line of tragedies that stretched back generations. And soon, when the mood hit my grandmother just right, she'd sit at her kitchen table, a Styrofoam cup of lemonade in her warped hand, and she'd tell the story of Sabrina Cordova—how men loved her too much, how little she loved herself, how in the end it killed her. The stories always ended the same, only different girls died, and I didn't want to hear them anymore.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Her stance was wobbly and unrefined, as though she had given someone else permission to wear her skin. That's when I knew she was forever caught in her own undercurrent, bouncing from one deep swell to the next. She would never lift me out of that sea. She would never pause to fill her lungs with air. Soon the world would yank her chain of sadness against every shore, every rock, every glass-filled beach, leaving nothing but the broken hull of a drowned woman.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Age has nothing to do with sadness.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“...but what was empty when you could always squeeze out another drop?”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“That's just dumb. No one wants a girl who doesn't talk. You might as well be dead.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Ever feel like the land is swallowing you whole, Sierra? That all of this beauty is wrapped around you so tight it's like being in a rattlesnake's mouth?”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Deaths, wedding, brithdays - the menu was always the same.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“And to the girls—may you see yourselves in books, may you write your own, and may your strength burn brighter than any sun.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina: Stories

“I thought of how strange it would be to touch someone so hot with fever you could barely hold them. I had never felt someone like that, and I wondered if I ever would.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Did you know the palm trees in our yard and all over this neighborhood, they aren't from San Diego? They aren't even from California. We learned about it in school. They don't belong here. Someone just thought they looked pretty.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“I always told him Tonto means fool...He claimed I was too literal.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Some people want to kill them, but I think even the ugly things deserve a chance to live. It's just about making sure things can live together without destroying each other."

...

"Who said anyone deserves anything, she thought...”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Avel and his cousin Benito welded iron bars over the windows. Pearla began doing housework in the mornings to avoid the afternoon shadows that fell upon her home like a cage... Pearla asked Avel to nail wooden boards over the bedroom window, blocking from the room both thieves and sunlight. It took some getting used to, but the darkness grew on Pearla.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Competition,' she always said, but Doty never cared for the men there, and she didn't view the women as competition. She simply enjoyed them, their beautiful clothes and hair, their bright happy faces.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Air felt virtuous to breathe, running through them as thrilling as their pulse, generating its own warmth, its own beat.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“My grandmother told Sabrina to ignore them. She said people will find the loveliest part of you and try to make it ugly. "And they will do anything," she always said, "to own that piece of you.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“My grandmother told Sabrina to ignore them. She said people will find the loveliest part of you and try to make it ugly.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina: Stories

“And that is our story of everything.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“...but as extra credit, I often ask a question related to Native Americans.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“Whenever I picture those faraway states...I think of white people and dead witches" Ana laughs and watches as Colleen's eyes narrow in confusion. "Kidding.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina

“I followed my mother to the main house, where she rang the doorbell and gently knocked. From behind her, I could make out her shoulder bones, ridged, as if her skeleton had been shattered and glued hastily back together. When the door opened and we were ushered inside by a man's high-pitched voice, my mother's back disappeared, swallowed by indoor dimness.”
― Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina