Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I don't like to see people get kicked around. You have to stand up for them. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Related Quotes:

" I'm always fascinated by the disjunct between what's really happening on the ground and the propaganda machine that feeds America alarmist news about immigration. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" We want to ascribe a kind of tragic grimness to people, but people are funny. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" A great Chicano forebear of mine in writing is Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. He was writing good border mysteries for Chicano readers back in the '80s and '90s. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I believe God is a poet; every religion in our history was made of poems and songs, and not a few of them had books attached. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Books are like chocolate. Can't eat just one. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I often say poetry was my first love. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I missed the Wilco phenom while busy obsessing over rock en Espanol. So imagine my surprise when I found myself at O'Hare getting on a plane with my Chi-town homeboy, Jeff Tweedy. I loved the guy right away and loved his family. How odd to know somebody before you listen to them. I don't know if that's bad or good. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" My dad looked like Errol Flynn, and I think my mom thought she was moving into a hacienda, but they lived on a dirt street in Tijuana, a house jammed with relatives, nobody speaking English. She didn't know a word of Spanish. She grew up well and was appalled and humiliated, terrified of anyone ethnic. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The French-Cajun culture is similar to mine - they're Catholic, they play accordions, and they eat hot chiles. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The situation was kind of complicated in that my mother didn't speak Spanish. My father spoke English, you know, as best he could. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I read most often in bed as part of my attempted sleep ritual. But I spend a lot of time reading on planes and in hotels, too. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I don't like being angry all the time; it's not good for me. I have to have serenity or else go to war. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Way back when I was working at the dump, I saw that, even when living among the trash, that some people would decide to choose joy in their lives. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" When I was doing missionary work when I was younger, which started this obsession of mine with the literature of witness, I was a translator for a missionary group, and I spent years in a Tijuana dump. People were really thrown by the fact that the Mexican poor, many of them pureblood indigenous people, seemed happy. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

Indigenous People

" I love books with titles like, 'How Do You Spank a Porcupine?,' 'Arnie, the Darling Starling,' or 'The Bat in My Pocket.' "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I was deeply infected with storytelling from the get go, and I truly love it. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" It's almost easy for me to write about a magnificent tropical village with orchids and dragonflies. That's intoxicating, but the United States is magical, too. We just forget this. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" Spanish was my first language. Honestly, I learned to first speak in Spanish, not English, because my poor mother had to go to San Diego every day to work and then come back. And she would come home when I was an infant long after I was asleep. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I am addicted to poetry, but the truth is I cannot pass up a good hard-boiled mystery. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" It's not like Mexicans have an illegal immigration organ in their body and at 14 kicks off a hormone and shows them how to come to the United States illegally. It's a question of desperation for a vast majority of them. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I saw 'The War Wagon' with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but it was dubbed into German. And it had Japanese subtitles and then this little strip with some Spanish words, and I've never forgotten that weird image. It was so magical and funky. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" We're all funny. Humor unites us. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" I had not seen lawns till fifth grade - big green lawns. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" It became really important to me if I was going to write 'Hummingbird's Daughter' to try to do honor to women. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" To me, writing is prayer. I pray all the time. "

Luis Alberto Urrea

" When I was a little boy in Tijuana, it was wonderland. We left when I was probably four - I was dying of tuberculosis. "

Luis Alberto Urrea