33 Quotes by Justin Torres

This is your heritage,' he said, as if from this dance we could know about his own childhood, about the flavor and grit of tenement buildings in Spanish Harlem, and projects in Red Hook, and dance halls, and city parks, and about how his own Paps, how he had beat him, how he taught him to dance, as if we could hear Spanish in his movements, as if Puerto Rico was a man in a bathrobe, grabbing another beer from the fridge and raising it to drink, his head back, still dancing, still steeping and snapping perfectly in time.

What we gotta do is, we gotta figure out a way to reverse gravity, so that we all fall upward, through the clouds and sky, all the way to Heaven.

Everybody’s got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don’t got is power.

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful – little animals, clawing at what we needed.

The magic of God is three. We were the magic of God.

Shame doesn’t exist in the animal kingdom. It’s a human conception.

As you become an adult, shame gets introduced and reintroduced constantly to you. So where something that, to a child, just is what it is – you know, your father’s violent but he loves you and that’s just the way it is – later on you realize that this is like different, shameful, blah blah blah.

When we were three together, we stuck our fingers into each other’s eyes and pulled chairs out from underneath.

I totally bristle against words like “dysfunction” or “abuse.”