Not Even the Dead Quotes

“Maybe the world is made to be seen that way, in semi-darkness, to be inhabited and loved and understood by feeling our way, barely glimpsed by the light cast by campfires or dreams.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“Sometimes the contestants humiliated themselves to win money and other times, the majority, humiliated themselves and won nothing. That’s America, the woman reasons: it was then and it is now.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“The brothers, armed with wise and stringent examples, reminded him that Matthew himself recognized that one must render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s; in other words, their souls were for God, and the Emperor could claim the worldly—and in some ways trifling—things such as gold. Upon hearing that rationale, the boy asked maliciously—and it is worth remembering that he wasn’t even fifteen at the time—whether the souls of the Indians who died unloading their gold from the earth’s depths were included in the tribute they owed the emperor. Here,”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“Only captains and kings count the dead by the thousands, precisely because they don’t have to look a single one in the eye.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“Throngs of Indians hammer the dirt with their hoes and coas as if to demonstrate that the same universal law applies in this part of the world, too: namely, that all things worth possessing have an owner, and that collecting even the remnants of those things requires great effort.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“Everything is simpler than we believe. Tomorrow comes, yesterday goes: everything is reduced to that. At least that is what the savages think. Do you know, they don't even have a word in their tongue to name such a simple thing as time? Earth and dust and sky: that is all that exists for them. Time is something we walk, he says, like the world. The past falls behind and the future draws near and the present is something we try to hold on to with both hands but can never quite grasp. Earth and dust and sky: that's all that exists.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“They sleep pressed together, in a circle around a little clearing where nothing is lit and nothing warmed. They eat cold jerky and cold tortillas, and they listen to their horses patiently chewing, the animals silhouetted in the moonglow. In the distance, they see blue-tinged thunderbolts strike silently on the horizon, and they see the scrawny shadows of coyotes, and stars that burn for an instant and are extinguished, and others so bright they look like caldera conveying fire from another world.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead

“What sort of imbecile hopes for justice, in this world? I don’t expect it now: somes stones we only trip over once in this lifetime. The world, too, is another stone. God tripped over it just one day, the day of its creation, and then he forgot or tried to forget it. Because it’s obvious that not even God seems to expect anything great from his creatures. If you don’t believe me, just look around.”
― Juan Gómez Bárcena, Not Even the Dead