A Gringo In Peru Quotes

Stumblingblocks? If you are facing one right now, be grateful for two reasons. It landed in front of you not on top of you. And now you have something to climb on top of so that you can see farther than you ever could before. Live large my friends, live deliberately. ~ Jim Killon

But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me?

You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo. ~ Ishmael Reed

They jabbered amongst themselves in a bizarre jibberish that sounded like Spanish gone wrong: maybe gringo Spanglish, some kind of Espanahuatl that I hadn't decoded yet, or a dialect of Spanmayan, Zapotecnish, Spanotomi, Mixtecnish, or some other new native language; or Japanish, Spanorean or…I'm getting carried away. You need a talent for picking up new words and grammars these days-it's become an obsession with me, someday I'll probably write a book about it, but in what language? ~ Ernest Hogan

You have fallen badly, señor gringo. Bribery is a very serious crime in this country. You will have to pay. ~ Rusty Young

It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise. Moon recognized the man as the new missionary. His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies. ~ Peter Matthiessen

[Author's Note:] When my grandmother came to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, she was a beautiful, glamorous woman from a wealthy family in the capital city, and the young bride of a dashing naval officer. She expected to be received as such. Instead, she found that people here had a very reductionist view of what it meant to be Puerto Rican, of what it meant to be Latinx. Everything about her confused her new neighbors: her skin tone, her hair, her accent, her notions. She wasn't what they expected a boricua to be.

My grandmother spent much of her adult life in the States but didn't always feel welcome here. She resented the perpetual gringo misconceptions about her. She never got past that resentment, and the echoes of her indignation still have some peculiar manifestations in my family today. One of the symptoms is me. Always raging against a perceived slight, always fighting against ignorance in mainstream ideas about ethnicity and culture. I'm acutely aware that the people coming to our southern border are not one faceless brown mass but singular individuals, with stories and backgrounds and reasons for coming that are unique. I feel this awareness in my spine, in my DNA.

So I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories - a work of fiction - as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in so doing, I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate. When we see migrant ~ Jeanine Cummins

As everybody in the Andes knows, when the devil comes to work his evil on earth he sometimes takes the shape of a limping gringo stranger. And ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

Mexico, as it was in the 1970s - and isn't now - was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see. ~ Mason West

I have the deepest regret about 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of the most difficult days I've ever had. I was in Lima, Peru, and had to fly back eight hours not knowing what happened in my own country, knowing thousands of my fellow citizens had died. ~ Colin Powell

When he showed them to the rebel leader, Tupac Amaru responded "these books are worthless other than to make empanadas or pastries; I'll just impose strong laws." He explained that once in power they would place one official in every town, who would collect the head tax and send it to the city of Cuzco. This program would begin in Cuzco but expand to Arequipa, Lima and Upper Peru. Escarcena also noted that Tupac Amaru told many people that he would get rid of lawyers and jails and simplify punishment. Major criminals would be hanged on the spot while smaller transgressions would be punished by hanging the perpetrator by one foot from the gallows, placed in every town. This streamlined system would not only reduce crime but also "get rid of lawsuits and notaries. ~ Charles F. Walker

In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life's basic rules - that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor. To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement. ~ Kim MacQuarrie

Down here, in our Cajun Magic Kingdom, I'm the Statue of Liberty. La Liberté éclairant le monde. But uptown, where the mold and the mildew still reign supreme, I go by Tiffany Proulx, which sounds like Peru, only without the pesky e inside. Most people call me Tiff, as in a fight, albeit a very small one. More like a squabble. A misunderstanding that's bound to sort itself out. Just give it a little time is all. ~ Kenneth Womack

Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of [82] excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither Calderon had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth. ~ Thornton Wilder

Something I learned when I was very young: with cooking, it doesn't matter where you are; you can always cook. You can end up in small village in Peru where somebody's cooking, take a spoon and taste it, and you might not be too sure what you're eating, but you can taste the soul in the food. That's what is beautiful with food. ~ Daniel Boulud

The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra. ~ Horace Walpole

Happier than a cat in a Peruvian fish market. ~ Coriander Woodruff

In the beloved community of 'Our Father,' the same desperate love that a mother has for her baby or that a child has for his or her daddy is extended to all our human family. Biological love is too small a vision. Nationalism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives or the people of our own country is not a bad things. But our love does not stop at the border. We now have a family that includes by transcends biology and geography. We have family in Iraq, Peru, Afghanistan and Sudan. We have family members who are starving and homeless, dying of AIDS and living in the midst of war. This is the new family of our Father. ~ Shane Claiborne

By the late 1970s, repression and economic chaos were causing increasing unrest throughout Latin America. Army strongmen were forced to cede power in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras and the Dominican Republic. ~ Stephen Kinzer

It's true that cilantro has a strange, strong flavor. People seem to love it or not like it at all. Even I didn't like it at first when I had it in Peru. But I got used to it - it's hard not to in South America - and now I can't live without it. ~ Nobu Matsuhisa

There is no way I am masturbating with a gringo to something as vile and disgusting as worm-rape! ~ Vince Kramer

Those in Argentina, Mexico and Peru,
Colombia and the Caribbean
Bear La Mancha and Quixote in their hearts
For he is an ultimate and overlooked Don Juan. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

I was taken out of school by my dad when I was 11 and lived in Mexico City, then later in Paris. I went with him to excavate in Bolivia and Peru. I never finished high school. I was a straight F student anyway. My father admitted to me later that he'd thought I would come to no good. ~ Michael Heizer

Those reporters, writers, photographers, and editors are the best Americans I know. They cherish the ideals of their imperfect profession and of the Republic whose freedoms, equally imperfect in practice have so often made those ideals real. They want desperately to do good, honorable work. In spite of long hours and low pay, they are insistently professional. They are also brave.

I can't ever forget that in Indochina 65 journalists were killed in the course of recording the truth about that war. . . .Reporters and photographers did not stop dying when Vietnam was over. They have been killed in Lebanon and Nicaragua, in Bosnia and Peru, and in a lot of other places where hard rain falls.

I can't believe that these good men and women died for nothing. I know they didn't. They died because they were the people chosen by the tribe to carry the torch to the back of the cave and tell the others what is there in the darkness. They died because they were serious about the craft they practiced. They died because they believed in the fundamental social need for what they did with a pen, a notebook, a typewriter, or a camera. They didn't die to increase profits for the stockholders. They didn't die to obtain an invitation to some White House dinner for a social-climbing publisher. They died for us.

As readers or journalists, we honor them when we remember that their dying was not part of a plan to make the world cheaper, baser, or dumber. They died to ~ Pete Hamill

I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league. ~ Michael Ignatieff

Fter the O.J. Simpson trial there was talk about how the country was splitting in two - one part black, one part white. It was ludicrous: typical gringo arrogance. It's as though whites and blacks can imagine America only in terms of each other. It's mostly white arrogance, in that it places whites always at the center of the racial equation. ~ Richard Rodriguez

When Peru had a cholera outbreak in 1991, losses from tourism and agricultural revenue were three times greater than the total money spent on sanitation in the previous decade. ~ Rose George

Catarina hooked her hand around Magnus's elbow and hauled him away, like a schoolteacher with a misbehaving student. They entered a narrow alcove around the corner, where the music and noise of the party was muffled. She rounded on him.
"I recently treated Tessa for wounds she said were inflicted on her by members of a demon-worshipping cult," Catarina said. "She told me you were, and I quote, 'handling' the cult. What's going on? Explain."
Magnus made a face. "I may have had a hand in founding it."
"How much of a hand?"
"Well, both."
Catarina bristled. "I specifically told you not to do that!"
"You did?" Magnus said. A bubble of hope grew within him. "You remember what happened?"
She gave him a look of distress. "You don't?"
"Someone took all my memories around the subject of this cult," said Magnus. "I don't know who, or why."
He sounded more desperate than he would've liked, more desperate than he wanted to be. His old friend's face was full of sympathy.
"I don't know anything about it," she said. "I met up with you and Ragnor for a brief vacation. You seemed troubled, but you were trying to laugh it off, the way you always do. You and Ragnor said you had a brilliant idea to start a joke cult. I told you not to do it. That's it."
He, Catarina, and Ragnor had taken many trips together, over the centuries. One memorable trip had gotten Magnus banished from Peru. He had always enjoyed those adventures more than any others ~ Cassandra Clare

I think my sense of color I have got from my upbringing in Peru. ~ Mario Testino

We are now facing a difficult situation in Peru, where there are attempts to cut back the territorial rights of the indigenous peoples, including moves to divide, fragment and privatise our communal organisations. Now more than ever, it is a matter of urgency for us to consolidate our own indigenous alternatives for development. ~ Evaristo Nugkuag

Tamara Bunke was the only woman to fight alongside "Che" during his Bolivian campaign. She was an East German national, born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on November 19, 1937, of Communist activist parents. As a child, her home was frequently used for meetings, hiding weapons and conducting other Communist activities. After World War II, in 1952 she returned to Germany where she attended Humboldt University in Berlin. Tamara met "Che" Guevara when she was an attractive 23-year-old woman in Leipzig, and he was with a Cuban Trade Delegation. The two instantly hit it off as she cozied up to him and, having learned how to fight and use weapons in Pinar del Rio in western Cuba, she joined his expedition to Bolivia.
Becoming a spy for the ELN, she adopted the name "Tania" and posed as a right-wing authority of South-American music and folklore. In disguise, she managed to warm up to and entice Bolivian President René Barrientos. She even went on an intimate vacation to Peru with him. ~ Hank Bracker

I think it's strange - so alike and yet so different! We are capable of working together, of building the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the cathedrals of Europe and the temples of Peru. We can compose unforgettable music, work in hospitals, create new computer programs.
"But at some moment all this loses its meaning, and we feel alone, as if we were part of another world, different from the one we have helped to build."
"At times, when others need our help, we grow desperate because this prevents us from enjoying life. At other times, when nobody needs us, we feel useless.
"But that's the way we are. We are complex human beings. Why despair? ~ Anonymous

(he was a great believer in the healing powers of cheerfulness, if not of open mirth). Yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of enquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Every new development, highway, railroad, steamship line, building operation, whether it be a drainage project in old Greece or a new water system in Peru, means an added use of the automobile. ~ Walter Chrysler

I can never see fashion models,
lean angular cheeks, strutting hips
and blooming hair, without thinking of
the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye. ~ Miroslav Penkov