Spanish Inquistion Quotes

It was a heartless age ~ Kirsten Downey

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo
It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered. ~ Alice Walker

I've heard it said that if you know English, Spanish, Italian, and I think it's French, you can go just about anywhere in this world ... except for China where they have all those derelicts. ~ Mike Shannon

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M.Cain. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children's books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer's word counter feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet. ~ David Nicholls

I find myself using Spanish words much more now that I'm older, and I guess I have the authority to do it in public spaces in ways that I felt I couldn't when I was teaching here fifteen years ago. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Do you think about making love with me?"
I lie awake most nights, fantasizing about sleeping next to her ... loving her. "Right now, muneca, makin' love to you is the only thing on my mind. ~ Simone Elkeles

Are you an idiot?' she asked, in perfect Spanish. 'I'm in training,' I admitted. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Moviewise, I would love to make the story of princess Erendira. She was a 16 year old princess/warrior who led her tribe in war against the Spanish around 1513. She almost defeated them, and the Tarascans were the only tribe the Aztecs couldn't defeat. ~ Tamara Feldman

I will go anywhere if you say the phrase 'there might be cake.' I would go to the Department of Motor Vehicles, register somebody else's boat in Spanish, a language I do not speak, without ID - for cake. ~ Greg Behrendt

My mother passed away when I was 14, so there were certain things I missed in terms of upbringing. Maybe my mother would have said, 'You have to get a real job.' I don't know because I didn't have that experience. My fortes in school were Spanish, sports, reading and theater. That's what they encouraged. ~ Joie Lee

The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state ~ Slavoj Zizek

However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it. ~ Valeria Luiselli

The two greatest strokes of luck that can happen to a painter are (1) to be Spanish, (2) to be called Dali ~ Salvador Dali

I am told that César Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas.

Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today. ~ Roberto Bolano

A good book should make you laugh, cry or pee your pants. The best do all three! ~ G. Ernest Smith

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street. ~ Mona Simpson

President Bush appeared with Arnold Schwarzenegger at a huge campaign event. Only in California can a governor who speaks German and a president who can barely speak English try to make themselves clear to an audience that's primarily Spanish. ~ Jay Leno

The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was ~ George Bernard Shaw

Remember that a little learning can be a pleasant thing. Italy gives much, in beauty, gaiety, diversity of arts and landscapes, good humor and energy - willingly, without having to be coaxed or courted. Paradoxically, she requires (as do other countries, probably more so) and deserves some preparation as background to enhance her pleasures. It is almost impossible to read a total history of Italy; there was no united country until a hundred years ago, no single line of power, no concerted developments. It is useful, however, to know something about what made Siena run and stop, to become acquainted with the Estes and the Gonzagas, the Medicis and the Borgias, the names that were the local history. It helps to know something about the conflicts of the medieval church with the Holy Roman Empire, of the French, Spanish and early German kings who marked out large chunks of Italy for themselves or were invited to invade by a nervous Italian power. Above all, it helps to turn the pages of a few art and architecture books to become reacquainted with names other those of the luminous giants.

The informed visitors will not allow himself to be cowed by the deluge of art. See what interests or attracts you; there is no Italian Secret Service that reports on whether you have seen everything. If you try to see it all except as a possible professional task, you may come to resist it all. Relax, know what you like and don't like - not the worst of measures - and let the rest go. ~ Kate Simon

put Mentos in his Spanish teacher's Diet Coke. ~ Rick Riordan

You get what you pay for. ~ Gabriel Biel

I never thought I'd get to see Rome," Hazel said. "When I was alive, I mean for the first time, Mussolini was in charge. We were at war."
"Mussolini?" Leo frowned. "Wasn't he like BFF's with Hitler?"
Hazel stared at him like he was an alien. "BFF's?"
"Never mind."
"I'd love to see the Trevi Fountain," she said.
"There's a fountain on every block," Leo grumbled.
"Or the Spanish Steps," Hazel said.
"Why would you come to Italy to see Spanosh steps?" Leo asked. "That's like going to China for Mexican food, isn't it?"
"You're hopeless," Hazel complained.
"So I've been told. ~ Rick Riordan

Oh,you talking to me now?" I ask.
"What?" he aks innocently, his cocoa eyes ide. "You noticed my silencio treatment in Spanish class?" He takes his shot,sinking it.
"Yeah,I noticed when I had to do Actividad twenty-to by myself,as both waiter and customer," I say, catching the ball and passing it back to him. ~ Alecia Whitaker

[The Mexican revolution] was a break with the past to recover the past. We were trying to deny we had an Indian and a black and a Spanish past. The Mexican Revolution accepted all heritages. It allowed Mexico to be mestizo. ~ Carlos Fuentes

You know, Piggly Wiggly never could hang on to a night stock manager. Your math skills would be a plus, maybe even your Spanish, and you don't mind staying up late."

"Piggly Wiggly, wow. I hadn't thought about that. I'll swing by, pick up an application tomorrow. But if it doesn't pan out maybe ... Never mind, it's a crazy idea."

"No, tell me. I want to hear it."

"Well, just as a backup plan, I did hear that Sony has an opening. They're, um, they're looking for a rock star. The hours suck, but it's no worse than night stock manager at Pigs. I bet it pays better too."

Isabel stopped in her tracks, playfully slapping his arm. "Aidan, that's genius! That's what you should do! I've heard you sing, you can carry a decent tune." She looked him up and down. "With a little work, you can probably pull off the image."

He tugged on her arms until she was in his. "Only if you're sure. Only if it's what we want."

"Aidan, it's who you are. I've known it since the day we brought that first guitar here. I'd never want to take that away. ~ Laura Spinella

I've never enjoyed myself more than I have the past forty-eight hours, during which I've been trapped in a car with one of the worst drivers I've ever seen, run up the Spanish Steps and then down again so I could be on time to wait in line to perjuer myself at the American consulate. And I'd like to continue doing those sorts of thing with you on a regular basis for the foreseeable future. ~ Meg Cabot

Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ... ~ Katherine Anne Porter

I must confess, my Spanish is not so good - except I read a little, so I started with the English but then determined that it would have to be in Spanish. ~ George Crumb

You see how Spanish, Italians, Portuguese play football. I don't say they are perfect, I say English football has a few things to learn from them in the same way they have a lot of things to learn from English football. ~ Jose Mourinho

German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. ~ George Bernard Shaw

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds were closed. They thudded to the floor. And yet, there was something magnificent about it. Profesora Shields explained that in English there was no usted, no tu. There was only one word - you. It applied to all people. No one more distant or more familiar. You. They. Me. I. Us. We. There were no words that changed from feminine to masculine and back again depending on the speaker. A person was from New York. Not a woman from New York, not a man from New York. Simply a person. ~ Cristina Henriquez

But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonies wavering in the small room, as if to remind them both that beauty and loss were inseparably entwined. ~ Claire Messud

People say we're all identical, but Jennifer Lopez is an American. She's from New York. She doesn't have an accent. Some of these Latin people - their Spanish is pathetic. They learned it when they became famous as Latinos. ~ Salma Hayek

What he felt during his Spanish encounter with left-wing anti-Christianity was similar to his reactions to the anti-Christianity of the right. The "novelty and shock of the Nazis", Auden wrote, and the blitheness with which Hitler's acolytes dismissed Christianity "on the grounds that to love one's neighbor as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings", pushed him inexorably toward unavoidable questions. "If, as I am convinced, the Nazis are wrong and we are right, what is it that validates our values and invalidates theirs?" The answer to this question, he wrote later, was part of what "brought me back to the church. ~ Ross Douthat

I believe that the very act of believing in something causes us to distance ourselves from that thing, thus a duality is created: oneself and the thing in which one believes. Now since we all know that in order to fully understand a thing one must be that thing -- walk a mile in its shoes so to speak -- it seems obvious that the state of believing in something inevitably causes us to not truly understand that thing in which we believe. This noncomprehension leads to all sorts of difficulties. "I believe in love" has a better than even chance of leading to divorce, while "I believe in God" seems to end in variations on the Spanish Inquisition. But -- and it's a big but -- if one were love, one couldn't help but be affectionate and caring towards oneself and others. If one were God, one would act toward all beings and all things as if they were one's own creations. And that, my friends, is the secret of life in a two-second vanity card. Of course, the secret could also be "Sit, Ubu, sit." We have to keep an open mind ~ Chuck Lorre

I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago. ~ Rinko Kikuchi

The Spanish troops returned and we could yet discover the grass beaten down in the direction which they went. ~ Zebulon Pike

The governor of Texas, who, when asked if the Bible should also be taught in Spanish, replied that 'if English was good enough for Jesus, then it's good enough for me'. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I wasn't aware that 'House on Mango Street' was so influenced by Spanish until after I finished. ~ Sandra Cisneros

After Zorro, people spoke Spanish to me for ages. I'm Welsh but that movie instantly gave me a new ethnicity. ~ Catherine Zeta-Jones

if you ask me if i am fluent / i will tell you my Spanish is understanding that there are stories / that will always be out of my reach / there are people / who will never fit together the way that i wanted them to / there are letters / that will always stay / silent / there are some words that will always escape / me. ~ Melissa Lozada-Oliva

As a Latino growing up in Spanish harlem, it's not easy trying not to be hot-headed. ~ Erik Estrada