Quotes from Alberto Alvaro Ríos

Adults have the benefit of experience and know the trick will work as long as the technique is correct. When we "grow up" we gain this experience and knowledge, but we lose our innocence and sense of wonder. In other words, the price we pay for growing up is a permanent sense of loss.

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.

Look back only for as long as you must, Then go forward into the history you will make. Be good, then better.

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 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.

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.

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.

These are the maps we make of ourselves, The foods and mountains, the world, The stars, the air we are for each other— These are the measure. We are ourselves, Every inch a mile for each other. My friend, that's all. And it is everything. We used to be somebody else, One here, one there, but now together We are today, and will be tomorrow.

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.

But I was in this bowling league with a good number of friends who came from across the line. We got the phone call that the border had been closed, and that absolutely nobody was being allowed to cross--not parents, not children, not anybody. Who knew what disguise the assassin had used.

Citizens of a Great Country We are made of them, finally, as we try to sleep, to reach The place that night with all its stars has shown us, All its stars as all of us, and all our cities, and all our countries, All our histories and all our families, every one. The country of us is large. We ourselves are its border Wherever we are, whoever we are, safe as we try and want to be.

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.

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.

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.