Onion Field Quotes & Sayings

There were stories in sweat.

The sweat of a woman bend double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren't on the payroll of the enemies he was fleeing...
Sweat was a body's history, compressed into jewels, beaded on the brow, staining shirts with salt. It told you everything about how a person had ended up in the right place at the wrong time, and whether they would survive another day. — Paolo Bacigalupi

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore. — Joseph Wambaugh

The Onion Field, that one got pretty close to me because I was a cop when it happened. I saw some of the indifference that my police department showed to the surviving officer. — Joseph Wambaugh

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice. — Joseph Wambaugh