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Borderlands Quotes

Browse 7 quotes about Borderlands.

Borderlands Quotes

“You cross a border because you are searching, because you want more, because you want to match where you are with who you are, because you want to test your place. Maybe because you want to expand your sense of place. You are searching for something that may as yet be indefinable. A border crosser questions the very idea of home.”

“I believe we have reached a point where those of us who belong to this culture of la frontera in Ysleta and El Paso are not content to sit back and watch others tell us who we are. We know who we are, and we ourselves can tell others about what we love and what we fear and what we hate and what can save us. I believe our community has developed that confidence to step forward and start taking responsibility for the many images that are projected in the name of Ysleta and El Paso.”

“So the Juárez/El Paso area before the recent drug violence was not a bilingual, bi-national, bicultural Zion, but it was one world. One entity. One place. One city where you could live in between worlds, and have the hope of creating something new. A third way to be, not along the border, but on the border. That is what the violence has destroyed, that unity, however tenuous it ever was. It has destroyed the idea of that unity and the reality of living so uniquely astride an international border. This ‘real idea’ was always a work-in-progress, and for the moment it is lost. Yet that real idea of unity had great value.”

“I believe the root of this strength of will came from my mother and father, from the work they taught me to do in the borderlands, the work that had broken many backs, the work that was a scream against the desert dust, this work that taught me about the song of nothingness in my bones and why the only way to live was to die on my feet.”

“This is the moment of Lydia's crossing. Here at the back of this cave somewhere in the Tumacacori Mountains, Lydia sheds the violent skin of everything that's happened to her. It rolls down from her tingling scalp off the mantle of her shoulders and down the length of her body. She breathes it out. She spits it into the dirt. Javier. Marta. Everything. Her entire life before this moment. Every person she loved who is gone. Her monumental regret. She will leave it here. She stands at Lorenzo's feet. She turns away from him. 'I forgive you,' she says.”