Michael Nava on Life

"This is my life, I thought, these are the people among whom I have spent it, prostitutes, tattooed boys with dead eyes, and horny cops."

"Life is a kind of exile and we all long to go home. Who said that?"

"He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands."

"I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life."

"Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die."

"The isolation that was so much a part of the city's psyche, the feeling that its ten million people were all living parallel lives that never intersected"

"The principle of all existence is cause and effect. Scientific knowledge illuminates causes so that men are not condemned to go on living ignorantly in effects."

"I shrugged. "Being born into my family was like being thrown into an accident."

"There are only two stages to dying, Henry. Being alive and being dead."

"...If you consort with lowlifes you've got to expect complications."

"All I knew about his life was that he had had the kind of childhood that turns people into psychological time bombs. How would I react when he started to go off? Did I have my own time bomb ticking away in me?"

"The vendors shrilled their wares as if the lard, coal, tortillas, or candies they were selling were the last of their kind. Their cries, as they blended together, were like bird calls, as if the city were a gigantic aviary."

"There are means people and there are ends people. The means people create distinctions among means and call it morality. The ends people understand that in this world, in this system we're born into, anything that gets you what you want is a good thing."

"I am a man like other men who love and suffer. Do I love Ángel? Yes, I love him. Do I suffer because of it? Yes. I suffer because my love for him must remain a secret and our life together enshrouded in lies." He swigged the pulque. "Can you imagine living in a world where there is no place in the sun for you, Miguel? Only a few rat holes like this one."

"Greed had always seemed to me the most self-defeating of vices, because one cannot own anything permanently: we have, at most, a life tenancy in our possessions. But I suppose the fulfilment was in the acquisition and maybe, too, someone who'd been tossed around by life needed the cosseting that money and things provide."

"Some people are just so beautiful that life seems to speak to us through them - they're vital, radiant. It's more startling in men than women, I think, because we don't usually let ourselves think of men that way. But Shakespeare knew. Remember the sonnets? 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,' was written to another man."

"Having had to work twice as hard for what he deserved on merit alone, he'd developed a kind of rage, like an extra set of muscles, propelling him through life. The rage never went away. There was never enough to reward you for what you had suffered. And you never, ever, forgot you were an outsider, no matter how expensive your suits."

"Just listen to me. I don't want to die, Henry. I want to be like everyone else. I want my seventy-five years or whatever, but I know I'm not going to have them and it makes me crazy." He tipped his head back and swallowed hard. "I can't help resenting you. You're going to be alive after I'm dead and you'll find someone else." He drew a deep breath. "It's not fair. I had to get away from you. I had to get away from my own resentment."