Top 15 Rudy Ruiz Quotes

What is a revolutionary…if not the architect of a new way of life?

They felt as if they were two glasses of water being poured into one larger container. Swirling and settling in the darkness.

She remembered her father's words one day as they sat alone in the drugstore. He had said, waving his arms in a grand gesture, 'It took me years to figure out that what truly heals is not all these drugs and medicines. No, no señorita. Only love can heal. The love of between two people. The love of family and home. The love you hear in a song or see in a painting or design. El amor vive eterno.' Love lives eternal.

This place is too pure for the Church. No, let the Church own the giant basilicas and ornate cathedrals. Let the Church own altars encrusted with gold and chambers draped in velvet. This place is for God and His creatures...for you and for me. This patch of salt will be here still after we've all expired, and after the church bells have tumbled to the ground, and after the towers have crumbled and washed out to sea. And even when the sun is silent and nothing but a ball of frozen, burnt-out gas, we'll roam these flowing wisps of grass....

I think we're all a little bit crazy. But once we figure that out, we can start doing something about it.

If you're not careful, the blood that you carry inside will turn those dreams that you so love into nightmares.

But now those days seemed long gone, as distant as the feeble stars dimmed by the growing lights of the city. And although his father would assault him no further with his fists or with his belt, a lonesome wrath twisted through him like a venomous knife, like the hunger he had known as a child, eating the thrice-refried beans that tasted like the dirt that mingled with the tears on the floor beneath the kitchen table. Maybe he had been given a chance at this Sueño Americano, but he felt inexplicably robbed of something greater.

So strong had his voice become that people on neighboring ranches and farms would drag their rocking chairs onto their patios on the nights they knew he was visiting and listen to the corridos he and Fernando Cisneros sang, their voices carried on the gentle breezes of the Gulf for miles on end.

His father had yearned to give his family the American Dream, to make up for the Mexican Nightmare he had lived as an orphan, roaming from town to town begging for food during the Revolution, sleeping wherever he could find shelter or work. And still he toiled in the darkness of his tire shop on the south side of the river to support the family he both adored and despised on El Otro Lado. But, it was obvious to Fulgencio that his father's daily crossing of the river failed to cleanse him of his demons, failed to purify him of his tormented thoughts. There were times when his father just had to hit someone, anyone standing nearby.

Standing in that same hut, all these years later, he fastened a bolo tie around his neck. He threw a black western jacket over his shoulders in one compact motion. He secured his gun in its shoulder holster. And he straightened his black Stetson with one hand while he combed his mustache with the other. He didn't need a looking glass to tell him how he looked. It was high noon and time to go to the funeral. To meet Carolina once again. He kissed the ghost of his grandfather playing solitaire at the table. He plucked a single white rose that had sprung from the image of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the adobe wall. And he ducked into the blasting sun.

Don't be afraid to love. If you love, you'll never truly be alone.

The beauty of Catholicism," he had pontificated to his grandson, "is that even if you spent your entire life sinning, you can die moments after repenting and still get into Heaven. So live it up, Fulgencio. Just don't let death catch you by surprise.

Someone drew a line in the sand, and we crossed back and forth until it disappeared.

Without love, we're dead.

Parting ways in the plaza, Solitario sat tall in his saddle surveying the changing cityscape. A ball of tumbleweeds rolled aimlessly across the deserted plaza, drifts of dead leaves chasing after it, rustling in the incessant wind. He squinted at the cathedral from beneath his broad sombrero. He saw cracks growing in it with every passing moment. Yes, we will build wells, he thought in response to Elias' question. The water may keep us alive, but it will no longer protect us from our neighbor to the north. Nobody had mentioned it openly yet, but surely others were thinking about it just as he was. With the river rerouted south, they were no longer in Mexico. Their fate rested not on La Virgen's apparition, but in America's hands.