Capirotada: A Nogales Memoir
Alberto Alvaro Ríos
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Crossing over from Mexico to the United States was a big step, but that part was easy. Big things are like that--easy to identify, and, with a deep breath, done all at once. As life turned out, it was the small that was difficult. The small things--which is all the opposite of what one might think.”
“The curious measure, of course, is that we fail to recognize the most obvious notion in all of this: that we ourselves are the best magicians we know. What our bodies do, what our minds accomplish, and the context we can give to things, how we make it all fit together, this is something.”
“He had a ponytail. But this was not a regular ponytail from the Sixties, not a ponytail for show or for fashion. It was more. It was a personal ponytail, something more defining and lasting. A personal thing is different, and all the books and all the magazines in the world can't tell you what that is.”
“The Day of the Dead is, in fact, a day of sadness. But it is not a day of regret. I think we're all at work sorting our calendars out. What it is, is that sometimes as human beings we just simply feel something. That feeling has value. That's what holidays are. That's what this day and others like it are about.”
“Seven o'clock and you watched it and then you turned it off. The Fifties. It's like that in movies and television programs, but its plot there. The characters get some information from the newscaster and then they turn it off so they can speak. But we were the characters then. We still are, I guess, so it's only a matter of time before we start seeing television shows where the people turn on the news to get some information and then, instead of turning it off so they can speak, they leave it on, and we get swept into some endless video vortex, some film loop, which has us by the eyes and won't let us go.”
“It was just spooky . . . . The Bird-man, the War-man, those guys, and that day we tried to find out something. I don't know if we did, though. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was something about what's personal. I don't know, but it's lasted a long time.”
“In this place that we live--my West, my father's North, and my mother's new hemisphere--rabbits in a burning field of grass can catch on fire. They run to a clear place where there is no fire, but, in doing so, light it up because their fur is burning. That way, in trying to save themselves, they spread the fire more. . . . And it speeds to everyone.”
“I remember one woman making paper flowers to sell, with different herbs . . . She made them so fast, and so many . . . that as I watched, her first few zinnias became quickly enough a few hundred, and grew in their happiness to the size of sunflowers. The sunflowers themselves grew to the size of pumpkins, the snapdragons grew ominous, and the rosemary fragrant.”
“His bread incident was just like my own story of getting run over. I didn't get hurt, exactly, though I did get to see the underside of something I thought I knew but I didn't. My father and I, in our turn, got to see something new in the middle of what was absolutely familiar, which is the hardest place to see it. Neither of us ever forgot.”
“But it was not just my grandmother there waiting for her husband to come home happy or dead. The side stories of revolution were there in Tapachula, a whole town of displaced people put on hold, taken out of time, not so different from the Nogales in which I was raised . . . . they were towns next to countries, but inside countries as well.”
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Book Keywords:
character-description, onfire, nogi-nogie-bordertown-nogales, gettingrunover, wonderment, dayofthedead-holidays-beahuman, thepersonal, details, bordertown, lafrontera, howdoesyourgardengrow, mundanetomagic, beautiful-imagery, slowly-dying, magicalrealism
