Michael Nava Quotes

"War is destruction and destruction is easy," Madero said.

He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.

What gays and lesbians have to teach other Americans is that morality is how you live and how you conduct yourself, not what you happen to be.

[Detective McBeth] "Being out of the closet is a luxury that many gay people can't afford. Maybe you can't understand that, but it's something I think about."

It really was a brutal place, Los Angeles, less a city than a collection of hostile villages united only in their mutual suspicion of each other and a susceptibility to disasters, natural and otherwise. Fires, floods, riots and earthquakes; it was looking more and more like Armageddon-by-the-Pacific.

[Henry, to Elena, about Angel] "Remember when Edith called him an invulnerable? I've figured out that what that means isn't that things don't hurt him, but that they don't stop him."

It had that unnatural stillness of a place where people feared to venture outside.
"You better come in before someone tries to kill you," she said. "Did you lock your car?"
"Yeah. It has an alarm."
"That won't stop anyone around here."
"Bad gang problem?"
"When I was raising my kids, they used to play out in the streets. You see any kids out there now?"

[John] "You don't stop loving your kids because they fuck up," he said. "You love them more."

"Abuelita," he said, groping for words to frame his thought. "Was today history?" "History is simply the passage of time, José, so we are in history at every moment."

... the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say.

[Irene Gentry] "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."

[Henry Rios, to Paul Windsor] "Society is a conspiracy and everyone who's different is its target."

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.

[Henry, to the therapist] "You people always end up wanting to talk about mommy and daddy," I said, intending a joke, but it was more hostile than funny.

[Henry Rios, with Kevin Reilly] "Sometimes I can't believe what people do to each other." "Believe it," he said. "There's nothing that hasn't been done by someone to someone. People settling scores is what keeps us in business."