Hector Tobar Quotes

#1. Maybe innocence is a skin you must shed to build layers more resistant to the caustic truths of the world.

Hector Tobar

#2. I think even a hero is someone who has sort of the flaw or imperfection of character. I remember Alice Walker saying that once - she'd written a novel about a civil rights hero, and it was someone who had this flaw, this central flaw.

Hector Tobar

#3. In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.

Hector Tobar

#4. Without thiamine, feeding the men could trigger Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a nerve disorder

Hector Tobar

#5. The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about "El Pato" Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him.

Hector Tobar

#6. He is trapped underground, suddenly and unexpectedly close to death, but still in control of his fate. "At that moment I put death in my head and decided I would live with it," he says later.

Hector Tobar

#7. As a professional journalist, I've been interviewing people for almost thirty years. And the one thing I've learned from all those interviews is that I am always going to be surprised.

Hector Tobar

#8. One day the "Good Morning Everyone" team announces that the government of the Dominican Republic has offered to bring all thirty-three miners and their families to a relaxing resort in that Caribbean island nation.

Hector Tobar

#9. 500 calories a day for the first few days, largely with an energy drink that's supplemented with potassium, phosphates, and thiamine, a B vitamin that the body uses up during starvation.

Hector Tobar

#10. My job is to listen and to ask questions and to be respectful and win the trust of my subjects so that I can work my way into their memories and their point of view.

Hector Tobar

#11. Before he loved you, I suffered alongside him ... I was his son before he even met you ... Don't we need to be taken care of, too? "With all that money, the chicken coop [of relatives] gets all mixed up and the family gets warped," Jessica says.

Hector Tobar

#12. I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.

Hector Tobar

#13. The influence of cinema on all contemporary writers is undeniable. Because film is such a powerful and popular art form, we prose writers think cinematically.

Hector Tobar

#14. If you can sit here and talk to a person you don't know very well, and talk about all these things you've been through - that's something. That's courage. It's knowing yourself.

Hector Tobar

#15. Chile was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce,

Hector Tobar

#16. You cannot bribe a Chilean police officer - I know this firsthand.

Hector Tobar

#17. I've never been on a paperback tour before, you know, because usually you go on tour when a hardcover comes out.

Hector Tobar

#18. I come from a family of working people. My parents were Guatemalan immigrants who spent most of their lives in the service industry.

Hector Tobar

#19. Cuerdos, he says. They're sane.

Hector Tobar

#20. That's the way mining is. You always find a way to cheat fate," he says. "That's what's beautiful about being a miner: Supernatural things always happen." Now

Hector Tobar

#21. You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin.

Hector Tobar

#22. Who's running things?

Hector Tobar

#23. I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.

Hector Tobar

#24. Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men.

Hector Tobar

#25. Divorce was illegal in Chile up until 2005 or so.

Hector Tobar