The Travelers Quotes

“It’s the little cruelties that get you,” she told him. “Never the big hurts, the pains you can point to, and say, ‘Oh, I see this bruise,’ but the wounds that you can’t even tell are there until one day you are eating a bowl of fennel soup or sunbathing on the deck of the pool and you can’t move, you can’t do anything, because you think, Well, something is dead in me, what has been done to me, and why did I allow this to happen? And now, and now, and now…”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“Yan hated the paintings. The sight of them burned holes into his eyes.

"If they burn holes into your eyes, then you cannot see, and if you cannot see, then what exactly is the problem?”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“You think I slept with women at Trinity ....You don't use the lavatory where your kid lives."

And with this one statement, Mom and I understood that Dad had cheated, though the locality was in question.”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“In the garden there were small hard pears that you could lift from a tree, and tulips and peonies and hot pink azaleas that vexed me with their greedy bloom.”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“Dad’s out and Chico’s in, I’m like, fuck this. And she’s like watch your mouth and show adults respect. I pay the rent here. So I start staying out with my friends and skipping school just ’cause I feel like it and my teachers say, oh yeah, well here’s to your grades plummeting, and then I’m like, so what, and then they say one more semester and it’s over, you’re so out of here, and I’m like shit, no, they’ll send me to school with remedial kids. My little brother Peanut is gloating cause he’s at Bronx Science and thinks he’s the next Steve Jobs. That’s when I hit the books and school again. I cannot, will not, be showed up by Peanut. And that’s when I see the poster about the playwriting contest and Professor Bass, who is too old to be teaching high school but the damn union can’t fire him, says, you could probably write something decent if you weren’t so arrogant. He says half the students in the school don’t deserve to be here. And I roll my eyes and say well what, if you were”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“I will not sugarcoat the ugliness. People are dead who should be alive. People die every fucking day. And I know where the poison lives.”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers

“The women in Subic Bay—and later, Bangkok—had expected nothing of Jeb. Not even friendship. He could cross the bridge to Olongapo City for an hour or two, fuck them silly, and forget that he was killing their Asian brothers. Sex, how good it felt, sex, when he could still feel sex. You could occupy a country with guns and sex. Open your wallet. Pull out a five, ten, a little extra when you’re black. And know that the women had seen enough to welcome you and expect nothing.”
― Regina Porter, The Travelers