Quotes from The Cartel

“Maybe money can’t buy happiness, but it can rent it for a long time.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“When you ask people, “What’s America’s longest war?” they usually answer “Vietnam” or amend that to “Afghanistan,” but it’s neither. America’s longest war is the war on drugs.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Just across the bridge is the gigantic marketplace, the insatiable consumer machine that drives the violence here. North Americans smoke the dope, snort the coke, shoot the heroin, do the meth, and then have the nerve to point south (down, of course, on the map), and wag their fingers at the “Mexican drug problem” and Mexican corruption.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Maybe, Keller thinks, I’ve become too used to solitude. Maybe I like it too much.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Left-wing lesbians are perfectly natural,” Giorgio says, “but there’s something about a right-wing lesbian that’s, I don’t know…almost North American. Sort of Fox News–ish.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“you do not avenge a murder by killing—you avenge it by living.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Giorgio cannot leave a bottle undrunk or an attractive woman unfucked, and those activities tend to get in the way of revolution.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“This is not a war on drugs. This is a war on the poor. This is a war on the poor and the powerless, the voiceless and the invisible,”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“He who speaks least has the most power.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDS, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of these wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead—everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real. —Bruce Jackson Keynote address “Media and War” symposium, University of Buffalo November 17–18, 2003”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Betrayals start that way, with lies hidden in the shadows of silence.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Grande is Mexico’s harshest and most secure prison, and”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“prefer married women and expensive whores. You have a nice meal, a few laughs, a good fuck, and then you each go back to your own lives. It’s better that way.” So”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain’t never gonna run out of is white trash.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Tell me you don’t want to do those women on Fox News,” Jimena says. “Tell me you don’t,” Giorgio counters. “Anyway, of course I do. I want to convert them through the subversive power of the orgasm.” “So it would be a political act,” Jimena says. “I am willing to sacrifice myself for the cause,” Giorgio answers.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Perhaps loneliness—it is that loneliest time of the night, the predawn darkness when the worst dreams come, the sunrise seems far off, and the creatures that inhabit both the real world and the darker edges of the unconscious prowl with the impunity of predators who know that their prey is helpless and alone.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“It’s the new face of narco gang war, isn’t it? They’re becoming media savvy. They used to hide their crimes, now they publicize them. I wonder if they haven’t taken a page from Al Qaeda. What good is an atrocity if no one knows you did it? And maybe that’s the lede on my story. “The crimes that used to lurk in shadows now seek the sunlight,” or is that a little too “pulp”? Óscar will decide.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“As for corruption, who’s more corrupt—the seller or the buyer? And how corrupt does a society have to be when its citizens need to get high to escape their reality, at the cost of bloodshed and suffering of their neighbors?”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“the old “4-4-40” rough standard for human survival: four minutes without air, four days without water, forty days without food.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“You’re a big boy,” Ana observes, staring blankly into her cup. “You could have said no.” “I stand with Oscar Wilde on the subject of temptation.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“He writes mostly about crime, although if he can talk Óscar into it he’ll do “color” features,”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“with simultaneous wars in Baja, Tamaulipas, and now Michoacán. Keller has to admit that the violence is unprecedented. Even at the height (the depth?) of Barrera’s war against Güero Méndez, back in the ’90s, the fighting was sporadic—brief sudden peaks of violence—not a daily event. And not spread across three broad areas of the country, with multiple and interconnected antagonists. The Alliance fighting Teo Solorzano in Baja. The Alliance fighting the CDG/Zetas in Tamaulipas.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“Why do women love to talk about love?” Giorgio asks. “Why don’t men, is more the question,” Ana says.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“You can either love,” Pablo says, “or you can talk about it. You can’t do both.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

“He tells his guys, you change the oil in a Nissan, you just can't kill it. You'll die before that car will.”
― Don Winslow, quote from The Cartel

About the author

Popular quotes

“Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.”
― Kate Atkinson, quote from A God in Ruins

“I thought. I thought of the slow yellow autumn in the swamp and the high honey sun of spring and the eternal silence of the marshes, and the shivering light on them, and the whisper of the spartina and sweet grass in the wind and the little liquid splashes of who-knew-what secret creatures entering that strange old place of blood-warm half earth, half water. I thought of the song of all the birds that I knew, and the soft singsong of the coffee-skinned women who sold their coiled sweet-grass baskets in the market and on Meeting Street. I thought of the glittering sun on the morning harbor and the spicy, somehow oriental smells from the dark old shops, and the rioting flowers everywhere, heavy tropical and exotic. I thought of the clop of horses' feet on cobblestones and the soft, sulking, wallowing surf of Sullivan's Island in August, and the countless small vistas of grace and charm wherever the eye fell; a garden door, a peeling old wall, an entire symmetrical world caught in a windowpane. Charlestone simply could not manage to offend the eye. I thought of the candy colors of the old houses in the sunset, and the dark secret churchyards with their tumbled stones, and the puresweet bells of Saint Michael's in the Sunday morning stillness. I thought of my tottering piles of books in the study at Belleau and the nights before the fire when my father told me of stars and butterflies and voyages, and the silver music of mathematics. I thought of hot, milky sweet coffee in the mornings, and the old kitchen around me, and Aurelia's gold smile and quick hands and eyes rich with love for me.”
― Anne Rivers Siddons, quote from Colony

“Any gift from a true friend is valuable, even if it’s a hollow walnut shell.”
― Firoozeh Dumas, quote from Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America

“he would abandon her. Just like all the other guys in her life.”
― Morgan Rice, quote from Turned

“The full-figured form which she recognized as her own was lying on one of the floating stretchers the Kindred kept for transporting the sick or wounded. The stretcher itself had been crammed into the back of a space shuttle and there was someone sitting beside her, holding her limp white hand. But it wasn’t Sophie or Liv. Lock, she thought with dismay, watching the large male who was carefully cupping her hand in his. And sitting in the front of the shuttle, at the controls, was his brother, Deep. Though”
― Evangeline Anderson, quote from Sought

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.