Justin Torres Quotes & Sayings

All that pent up longing," he says, "all that desire to flail and flap around. Them wings have needs. — Justin Torres

We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots. We turned up the knob on the TV until our ears ached with the shouts of angry men. We wanted more music on the radio; we wanted beats; we wanted rock. We wanted muscles on our skinny arms. We had bird bones, hollow and light, and we wanted more density, more weight. We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more. — Justin Torres

I don't think that any family has a function. I just think that a family is. It just exists. — Justin Torres

When we were three together, we stuck our fingers into each other's eyes and pulled chairs out from underneath. — Justin Torres

What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven. — Justin Torres

The son will not speak to her. She watches him, and she wants to tell him that he can put all his hate on her; she will take it all, if that's what he needs her to do. Listen, really listen, and that's what she is saying in her silence. The boy can't help but hear. — Justin Torres

Animals don't think in terms of victims and villains, or good and bad, or evil, or shame. — Justin Torres

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful - little animals, clawing at what we needed. — Justin Torres

What happens when you die?" I asked. "Nothing happens." he said. "Nothing happens forever. — Justin Torres

The magic of God is three. We were the magic of God. — Justin Torres

Shame doesn't exist in the animal kingdom. It's a human conception. — Justin Torres

Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult. — Justin Torres

Each was radiant, gorgeous. How they posed for me. — Justin Torres

They weren't scared, or dispossessed, or fragile. They were possible. — Justin Torres

I'm an adult," the boy says. "I got rights."
"Everybody's got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don't got is power. — Justin Torres

WE ALL THREE sat at the kitchen table in our raincoats, and Joel smashed tomatoes with a small rubber mallet. We had seen it on TV: a man with an untamed mustache and a mallet slaughtering vegetables, and people in clear plastic ponchos soaking up the mess, having the time of their lives. — Justin Torres

Hours passed. A man came by twice and poked his head into my theater and looked at me questioningly. The third time, he came in and sat next to me and asked, "How many times you plan on watching this crap?" I shrugged my shoulders. He was wearing corduroy pants, and I would have liked to drag my fingernail across his thigh. "You hiding?" "I'm just sitting here," I said. "Yeah, never mind," he said. "I guess you're a bit young for that. What about your folks? — Justin Torres

Do it to me.' 'What?' we asked. 'Make me born. — Justin Torres

The water was tripping over itself, splashing and hypnotizing, and I tried to fix my mind on a chunk of it, like each little ripple was a life that began far away in a high mountain source and had traveled miles pushing forward until it arrived at this spot before my eyes, and now without hesitation that water-life was hurling itself over the cliff. I wanted my body in all that swiftness; I wanted to feel the slip and pull of the currents and be dashed and pummeled on the rocks below ... — Justin Torres

God's scattered all the clean among the dirty. You and me Joel, we're nothing more than a fistful of seed that God tossed into the mud and horseshit. We're on our own. — Justin Torres

Even later, I will come to doubt whether I ever really believed such a book would not be found
maybe my words were for all of them, that they might discover themselves, and discover me. — Justin Torres

I totally bristle against words like "dysfunction" or "abuse." — Justin Torres

This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about his own Paps, how he beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time. — Justin Torres

As you become an adult, shame gets introduced and reintroduced constantly to you. So where something that, to a child, just is what it is - you know, your father's violent but he loves you and that's just the way it is - later on you realize that this is like different, shameful, blah blah blah. — Justin Torres