Flamenco Quotes

I'd like to get something together - like a Handel, Bach, Muddy waters, flamenco type of thing. If I could get that sound, I'd be happy ~ Jimi Hendrix

...when you're property-hunting and you're running out of patience it's easy to make bad decisions. New York in particular has a way of making people twist reality in their heads. Who cares if the apartment is beneath a flamenco studio? I'll get used to the noise! Yeah, I know the whole apartment has only one window facing a brick wall, but I'm never at home during the day. ~ Ben Ryder Howe

El duende is literally the goblin wind or force behind a person's actions and creative life, including the way they walk, the sound of their voice, even the way they lift their little finger. It is a term used in flamenco dance, and is also used to describe the ability to "think" in poetic images. Among Latina curanderas who recollect story, it is understood as the ability to be filled with spirit that is more than one's own spirit. Whether one is the artist or whether one is the watcher, listener, or reader, when el duende is present, one sees it, hears it, reads it, feels it underneath the dance, the music, the words, the art; one knows it is there. When el duende is not present, one knows that too. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart. ~ Roger McGuinn

Ivy just had to look at him to know that Dean Bennet would never look at her. He was the kind of guy who dated flamenco dancers or famous actresses or multi-lingual international human rights lawyers. Not sheltered little daddy's girls who could barely look at him without turning red. ~ Amy Andrews

Whether meeting with leaders and parents concerned about drugs in Bonn, Lisbon, or with the Holy Father at the Vatican, or doing a pretty fair flamenco in Madrid, I think Nancy's one of the best ambassadors America's ever had. ~ Ronald Reagan

When you got back to his apartment, the flamenco dancers were still stomping around in the restaurant upstairs. Moriarity pushed a bottle of cheap Sauterne and sliced salami across the kitchen table. A large cockroach fell from the top of the refrigerator and landed with a click on the scarred linoleum floor. You lifted both your feet and curled your toes. ~ Lorena Cassady

I did ballet, jazz and flamenco from when I was five years old. And my professional career started with dancing in musicals. ~ Jennifer Lopez

With flamenco I was transported into a world where everyone is beautiful, because beauty is in everything, the glorious and the ugly; because flamenco celebrates living, through the cries of pain and the cries of joy, the symmetry of a young face and the character of an old face. ~ Nellie Bennett

Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass. ~ David Rakoff

A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or 'duende'. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance.

She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.

She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.

And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no ~ Ben Okri

Gertrudis could knit five sweaters in three days, ride horseback for hours, bake pastries for all the charity bazaars, take a painting class, dance flamenco, sing rancheras, feed lunch to seventy invited guests on a Sunday, and fall in love with total impunity with three different men every Monday. ~ Angeles Mastretta

In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin.
Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist's or a farmer's skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running "heritage quests." We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate. ~ Ellen Meloy

The sun tried to shine through the clouds but its light was dimmed even in us; high noon approached. I looked outside through the tinted windows at the people promenading down Madison. Couples held hands, bankers squeezed through crowds of window shoppers late for their daily thieving but all of them, even the poor, seemed content with existence, some even seemed happy. Nearly everyone's outer shell was delicate and gracious that at the end of it all, on the border of nonexistence, each and everyone was happy to be alive. Everyone carried their heads with a radiance past the space they occupied and glided through time like flamenco dancers in a studio as big as the planet. Everyone wore masks that hid their sorrow (either that or they were sincerely happy) or wore armor that lightened the burden on their shoulders. Worst of all, I could not detect ever a flicker of thought; brains mired behind viral images and videos of people making even greater fools of themselves than they already were. And as the greatest fool of them all, I walked among them, never having learned to don the mask of happiness. ~ Bruce Crown

I don't have many actors in my family, but I do have a Great Uncle that is a film-maker in Philadelphia, and my great-great-grandparents were Flamenco dancers in the 30's in New York, they were Spanish dancers. ~ Aubrey Plaza

On the Ace roof there was flamenco music playing, or bossa nova or something. It all seemed so contemporary and pleasant. The sun was setting and I ordered a white wine. Was this how everything was now? Just nice? I wondered if other people felt comfortable within niceness, or whether they didn't even notice that things were nice. Maybe they expected everything to be nice. Maybe nice was like air to them. ~ Melissa Broder

The flamenco of the Gypsy has nothing to do with the flamenco for tourists. Real flamenco is like sex. ~ Klaus Kinski

You cannot dance physically certain things. But look at tango dancers or flamenco or Japanese classical theater. You can, if you're smart enough and you collaborate with the right choreographers, you could really dance your age. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. ~ Janet Fitch

I love the dancing and the music from Latin cultures. I went to a Flamenco show in Spain once, and it completely took my breath away! ~ Torrey DeVitto

The guitar is such an incredible instrument; it plays classical, flamenco, jazz, country, bluegrass, rock, acid, blues. You'll never see a clarinet playing Black Sabbath. But you will see a guitar in a clarinet band playing rhythm. It is the most popular instrument in the world; it is the one everybody loves. ~ Randy Bachman

Lily Owens: If your favorite color is blue, why did you paint the house pink?
August Boatwright: [chuckles] That was May's doing. When we went to the paint shop, she latched on to a color called, "Caribbean Pink." She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish Flamenco. I personally thought it was the tackiest color I had ever seen, but I figured if it could lift May's heart, it was good enough to live in.
Lily Owens: That was awfully nice of you.
August Boatwright: Well, I don't know. Some things in life, like the color of a house, don't really matter. But lifting someone's heart? Now, that matters. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

If you write anything meaningful over there, June, keep it far away from this city. They will turn a story about glue-addicted gypsy children in the Balkans into an animated musical about a tribe of pixie-sized fairy-dust-loving flamenco dancers who live happily ever after with their dancing bears. ~ Annie Ward

As far as current inspiration, I'm listenting to a lot of flamenco, because the techniques used for flamenco can be adapted to playing bass. ~ Billy Sheehan