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Michael Nava

144 quotes

“[Donati] "You see why I don't advertise I'm gay?" "No, not exactly, Nick." "Because I don't want to be confused with people like Bob." He tossed back his drink. "Drag queens, leather queens, all those sick fucks who parade around and make it impossible for the rest of us to have normal lives.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Alex] Big ideas don't pay the rent.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Donati] "You couldn't have planned a worse place to put a city than LA.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Asuras] "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.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry] "...when you start running from yourself, you end up in some pretty dark places.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry, to Rod] "Hell's not a place, Rod, it's something people do to each other.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Elena] "My God is not an unpleasant old man who lives in the sky and forces people to make desperate choices and then condemns them if they get it wrong. For me, God is the clear inner voice that guides us to the choices that are right for us, if we're willing to listen. The choices are different for everyone.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Dr Hayward, to Henry Rios after his heart attack] "You're still a relatively young man. You'll be around for a while. Make the best of it, Henry. Live every moment as fully as you can, even if all you're doing is eating a bowl of soup.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[John, to Henry] "Here's your dog. Con todo, like you said. Mustard, relish, onion — you sure it's okay for you to eat this with your heart and all?" "If it's not," I said, biting into the hot dog, "I'll die a happy man.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[John, about children] "Mostly, you have to listen and try to hear what they're really telling you and remember that, half the time, they don't know themselves.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry, to Vicky] "I know you think homosexuality is a sin, but that's because you've been taught by ignorant people.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[John] "I tell you, Henry, I did not want to grow up. I figured if I grew up, I would stop having fun." "Something change your mind?" "No. I was right! You do stop having fun, or maybe the things that were fun when you were a kid stop being fun. For a while I just did 'em more, faster, harder, trying to get the fun back, but it didn't work.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He laughed, but then in a serious voice said, "I have my slips. You gotta know that about me." "Anyone who has standards has slips, John. Only good people worry about being good.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Dr Hayward, to Henry, after his heart attack] "Sex is not going to kill you — well, let me amend that. Safe sex is not going to kill you.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry] "Maybe she hasn't learned yet that good people can make terrible mistakes and still be good people.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Henry, to Tony Earl] "I'll argue self-defense." "You do that," he said, "but last time I looked at the jury instructions on self-defense, if someone comes at you with fists you don't get to blow their brains out with a semiautomatic." "You can if his fists can kill you," I said.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Elena, about daughter] "Now I understand that it isn't up to her to be who I might want her to be. It's up to me to love her for who she is.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had the open, cheerful, rather self-satisfied countenance of someone upon whom life had made very few demands.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After he left, the three of us sat on a bench worn to the wood by all the fidgeting bottoms that had occupied it before us.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[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.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You want me to stipulate that the cops violated her constitutional rights?" "This is the LAPD we're talking about, Kim. It would be shocking if they hadn't violated her rights.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Patricia Ryan was a tall, beautiful woman about whom many stories were told, some of them true.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Elena] "Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[John] "You don't stop loving your kids because they fuck up," he said. "You love them more.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Miguel Sarmiento] "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.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Alicia Gavilán] She had learned to distinguish between her personal thoughts and those thoughts that came to her like messages from a deeper source than her own personality. These deeper messages were sometimes consoling, but more often they had a challenging and unsettling quality. Her first impulse was always to resist them [...]. Yet as always happened, the thought simply repeated itself until she was forced to examine her reasons for rejecting it.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Miguel Sarmiento, to Alicia] "I do not wish to be disrespectful of your beliefs, but in my view religion is no more than superstition, a way to explain natural phenomena for which there are now rational and scientific explanations. Those superstitions may have served their purpose once, but their time has passed. The longer they persist, the more pernicious they become.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Alicia Gavilán, to Miguel] "We are all birds in cages, but some of us find reason to sing.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Her elderly mother, to Alicia] "Except in the novels of the Brontës, marriage is a barter. You make the best bargain you can before I die.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The room took shape in all its squalor: clothes scattered everywhere; plates of half-finished meals; the long table used as a desk, every inch of its surface covered by moldering documents, books, and sheaves of paper bestrewn with his father's tiny script.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[His father, to Miguel] "I know that a man's honour means nothing to your generation, but it is all that a man possesses in this life.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Alicia, with Miguel] "I do what I can to be faithful to Christ's admonition to love God and to love my neighbour. Nothing else matters." "To love God," he repeated. "How can you love a phantom?" "Because he is not a phantom to me. I perceive him in the scent of the flowers and the sun's warmth on my face. Do you truly not feel at this moment a benign and loving presence?" "Only yours," he said.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He felt like Hercules at the Augean stables commissioned to clean out the accumulated filth of centuries.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Padre Cáceres, to Miguel Sarmiento] "Poor people are not simply a set of diseases or potential diseases, Señor Doctor. They are human souls. If you wish to change their habits, you must learn what those habits are and why they have acquired them. You must meet the people.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While his father had railed against the church, to Sarmiento, the Christian sky-king, the virgin impregnated by the air, and the man who came back from the dead were stories so manifestly absurd they did not merit much more than a raised eyebrow and a shrug at human credulity.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're a fine one to talk about motherhood," Eulalia replied. "You expelled your children from your womb directly into Swiss boarding schools.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“..."a male with a woman's psyche"...”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Alicia, with Miguel] "As long as the poor are regarded as expendable parts of the machinery of the economy, they will continue to be ground into the dust." "The Lord said the poor will always be with us," she murmured. "One reason I am not a Christian," he replied. "Your Jesus should have spent less time teaching the poor to accept their lot and more time teaching the rich to share.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everywhere, he saw the symptoms of starvation as one economic crisis after another was balanced on the backs of the poor, while the city's anxious rich hoarded their wealth or sent it out of the country for safekeeping in foreign banks.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Jorge Luis] "It is my nature to love other men, Miguel. That may disgust you, but that night I decided I would no longer allow it to disgust me. It no longer does. I am at peace with myself." "Once I made that decision," Luis continued, "remarkable events occurred.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Come on, then," Gustavo said. "Let's get the circus started.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was so arrogant that he spoke of himself in the plural.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But something terrible had happened - she had become old. The decades of her marriage had curdled her gaiety into scorn, transformed her charming impertinence into sarcasm, bent her back, whitened her hair, and withered her limbs.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Jorge Luis] "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.”
Michael Nava (born 1954) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p.186 [speaking as at 1911]