Hector Tobar Quotes & Sayings

In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing. — Hector Tobar

Who's running things? — Hector Tobar

Cuerdos, he says. They're sane. — Hector Tobar

Before he loved you, I suffered alongside him ... I was his son before he even met you ... Don't we need to be taken care of, too? "With all that money, the chicken coop [of relatives] gets all mixed up and the family gets warped," Jessica says. — Hector Tobar

One day the "Good Morning Everyone" team announces that the government of the Dominican Republic has offered to bring all thirty-three miners and their families to a relaxing resort in that Caribbean island nation. — Hector Tobar

My job is to listen and to ask questions and to be respectful and win the trust of my subjects so that I can work my way into their memories and their point of view. — Hector Tobar

I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about. — Hector Tobar

If you can sit here and talk to a person you don't know very well, and talk about all these things you've been through - that's something. That's courage. It's knowing yourself. — Hector Tobar

Divorce was illegal in Chile up until 2005 or so. — Hector Tobar

The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically. — Hector Tobar

It seems silly to Franklin for his fellow miners to think of themselves as national heroes when all they've done is gotten themselves trapped in a place where only the desperate and the hard up for cash go to suffer and toil. They are famous now, yes, but that heady sense of fullness that fame gives you, that sense of being at the center of everything, will disappear quicker than they could possibly imagine. Franklin tries to speak this truth to his fellow miners, but he does so halfheartedly, because he knows the only way to learn it is to live it. — Hector Tobar

Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world. — Hector Tobar

I've never been on a paperback tour before, you know, because usually you go on tour when a hardcover comes out. — Hector Tobar

Without thiamine, feeding the men could trigger Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a nerve disorder — Hector Tobar

He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. "At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it," he says later. — Hector Tobar

You cannot bribe a Chilean police officer - I know this firsthand. — Hector Tobar

As a professional journalist, I've been interviewing people for almost thirty years. And the one thing I've learned from all those interviews is that I am always going to be surprised. — Hector Tobar

You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin. — Hector Tobar

That's the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate," he says. "That's what's beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen." Now — Hector Tobar

Chile was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce, — Hector Tobar

500 calories a day for the first few days, largely with an energy drink that's supplemented with potassium, phosphates, and thiamine, a B vitamin that the body uses up during starvation. — Hector Tobar

We have to recognize that we're nothing, the Pastor says. In the surface world, when they returned from the mine and showered and entered their homes, they were princes, kings, spoiled sons, well-fed fathers, Romeos. They believed their private worlds of home and family spun thanks to their labor, and that as workingmen and breadwinners they had every right to expect their world to revolve around their needs. Now the heart of the mountain has collapsed on top of them, and they are trapped by a block of stone, an object whose newness and perfection suggest, to some, a divine judgment. — Hector Tobar

I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry. — Hector Tobar

I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people. — Hector Tobar

I think even a hero is someone who has sort of the flaw or imperfection of character. I remember Alice Walker saying that once - she'd written a novel about a civil rights hero, and it was someone who had this flaw, this central flaw. — Hector Tobar

Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men. — Hector Tobar

The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about "El Pato" Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him. — Hector Tobar

You see, Francisco, a warrior isn't just someone who slays dragons - or Englishmen, like Mel Gibson does in our favorite movie, Braveheart. A warrior can also be a man who takes apart an engine to make soup and then serves it to his brothers, keeping up their spirits with the rising inflections of his voice. — Hector Tobar

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now
North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere — Hector Tobar

If you're working, it's the best therapy for posttraumatic stress, Juan says. Studies have shown that the gravity of posttraumatic stress is directly proportional to the length of time one lives with the threat of death, and Juan slowly unwinds the trauma of the sixty-nine days he lived inside a thundering mountain by going to work, fixing machines, then going back home, and then returning to work again. — Hector Tobar