Now I Surrender Quotes

“Los finales, no importa cuán cantados estén, nunca portan la calidad de lo terminal, cuando menos no para quien los va remontando. La última hora de intimidad con el otro siempre parece otra en la línea: un episodio repetible y sin consecuencias. Nunca nadie piensa que esa fue la última vez que se bebió esa saliva ni que lo que sigue es extrañar hasta la muerte el olor de la piel que se arremolina tras el lóbulo de una oreja. No registramos la última ocasión en que nuestros hijos nos dieron la mano para cruzar una calle. Cuando cambiamos de ciudad, de país, siempre pensamos que vamos a volver, que los demás se van a quedar fijos, como encantados, y que a la próxima los vamos a abrazar y van a seguir oliendo a la misma loción, tabaco y café quemado. Pero los amigos cambian, progresan y se compran lociones caras, dejan de fumar, dejan el café, huelen a té verde cuando volvemos. O se vuelven locos, los meten a hospitales psiquiátricos y tienen muertes horribles de las que nos enteramos por correo electrónico. Hay una última conversación lúcida viendo un partido de futbol con el abuelo y un último plato preparado por la mano maestra de la abuela, una última llamada telefónica con el profesor que nos hizo lo que somos y que una madrugada se resbala en la bañera y se muere.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Ahora me rindo y eso es todo

“The land would endure, but the world had ended.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender

“A shaman, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, is a person who has a concrete relationship with language, because he uses it for healing, as a tool and as medicine. To the shaman, words aren’t just words, but a scalpel for slicing and reorganizing what’s in this world, for cutting and binding; a phenomenon with power over all other phenomena—something truly sacred. In his Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss says that scientists’ problem with shamans is that they really do heal people.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“The idea is to write a book about a country that still exists but was erased from the maps. A”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“I think he already knew it would be his last day of freedom because it took him a while to make up his mind, but in the end he handed his soul to the gringos. And they fucked him in that cheery, cruel way of theirs, like the shitty things they do aren’t their fault, they’re the fault of the people getting fucked. They”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“To this day, the governments of Mexico and the United States get along best when they’re focused on screwing somebody else.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“Cochise, as I’ve said (probably advised by Geronimo, who at the time still saw the gringos as allies against the Mexicans), would have preferred not to open a front against the U.S. Army: it was enough to be the most wanted and hated Apache in Mexico. He tried to take the high ground and make the white-eyes see reason, and Bascom, like a child throwing a tantrum, said what gringos always say: he didn’t negotiate with bad guys—as if there were any guarantee that his people were the good guys. Before Cochise vanished into the stony folds of the Chiricahua Mountains, he shouted that they would regret what they had done.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“Until the nearly sixteen million non-Hispanic people who live there get therapy to resolve their flagrant father hatred, we refuse to spend a dollar on Texan soil. • • •”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“We drove through Texas across the Panhandle, the narrowest part, so we didn’t have to stop or get gas. Texas is both the most Mexican and the most shockingly and even embarrassingly anti-Mexican state in the country.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“To divide this budding world into three ill-conceived categories—given that “Indian” is an imprecise name for the original population of an entire continent, “white” is a color, and “Mexican” is a demonym—is, to put it as cautiously and elegantly as possible, a crock of shit.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“Endings, no matter how foretold, never announce themselves as final, at least not as they’re being lived.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender

“(Our children don’t know us at all”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender: A Novel

“To the gringos, these twenty-seven Chiricahuas were an enemy army. What we had to offer them was a fitting death for their warriors and assimilation for their children, absorption into the particular Mexican fabric of sorrows and joys. What the Americans had to offer was a life of humiliation, but one in which their difference would be recognized.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Now I Surrender

“Donde hoy están Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona y Nuevo México había una Atlántida, un país de en medio. Los mexicanos y los gringos como dos niños sordomudos dándose la espalda y los apaches corriendo entre sus piernas sin saber exactamente adónde porque su tierra se iba llenando de desconocidos que salían a borbotones de todos lados.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Ahora me rindo y eso es todo

“¿Cómo que un país sin nombre?, dijo, se llama Estados Unidos. Eso es como llamarse Aquí A la Vuelta o Personas de Bien, respondió ella.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Ahora me rindo y eso es todo

“Si quieres quédate, dijo, pero el bebé y yo vamos a ir: se lo va a contar a sus hijos y sus hijos a los suyos.

Tenía razón: a mí el bisnieto de ese bebé me contó esta historia que estoy contando.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, Ahora me rindo y eso es todo