The Mexican War Quotes

His eyes ran over her hungrily. "I couldn't get it out of my mind," he said, almost to himself, "the way it felt, back at my mother's house. I was never so hungry for anyone, but it wasn't completely physical, even then." He frowned. "I want you, Cecily, and I hate myself for it."
"What else is new?" She gestured toward the door. "Go home. And I hope you don't sleep a wink."
"I probably won't," he said ruefully. He moved toward the door, hesitating.
"Good night," she said firmly, not moving.
He stood with his back to her, his spine very straight. "I can trace my ancestors back before the Mexican War in the early 1800s, pure Lakota blood, undiluted even by white settlement. There are so few of us left…"
She could have wept for what she knew, and he didn't know. "You don't have to explain it to me," she said solemnly. "I know how you feel."
"You don't," he bit off. He straightened again. "I'd die to have you, just once." He turned, and the fire was in his eyes as they met hers, glittering across the room. "It's like that for you, too."
"It's a corruption of the senses. You don't love me," she said quietly. "Without love, it's just sex."
He breathed deliberately, slowly. He didn't want to ask. He couldn't help it. "Something you know?"
"Yes. Something I know," she said, lying with a straight face and a smile that she hoped was worldly. She was not going to settle for crumbs from him, stolen hours in his bed. Men were devious when desi ~ Diana Palmer

A female war correspondent so popular that she had some credibility in saying she controlled half of her newspaper's circulation approached General Winfield Scott during the Mexican War with information that could help him. He was unwilling to get help from someone in petticoats. ~ Harold Holzer

Although most Americans believed in Manifest Destiny, few could agree on exactly which lands the United States was supposed to govern. ~ Charles W. Carey Jr.

At the beginning, Lincoln was so inexperienced he had reverence for military expertise, not realizing that there wasn't any military expertise, that the most anybody had commanded up to that point had been somebody, some troops in the Mexican War, and it had been years ago. ~ David Herbert Donald

It [the Mexican War] was a training ground for generals, so that when the sad self-murders settled on us, the leaders knew the techniques for making it properly horrible. ~ John Steinbeck

The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning. ~ Harold Holzer

A prominent Chicago politician, Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: no, I opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

This New World utopia, this promised land, was soon buried under the ashes and cinders that erupted over the Western World in the nineteenth century, thanks tot he resurrection and intensification of all the forces that had originally brought 'civilization' itself into existence. The rise of the centralized state, teh expansion of the bureaucracy and the conscript army, the regimentation of the factory system, the depredations of speculative finance, the spread of imperialism, as in the Mexican War, and the continued encroachment of slavery-all these negative movements not only sullied the New World dream but brought back on a larger scale than ever the Old World nightmares that the immigrants to America had risked their lives and forfeited their cultural treasures to escape. ~ Lewis Mumford

I've seen zero evidence of any nation on Earth other than Mexico even remotely having the slightest clue what Mexican food is about or even come close to reproducing it. It is perhaps the most misunderstood country and cuisine on Earth. ~ Anthony Bourdain

In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family's Mexican shades passed as various. ~ Richard Rodriguez

The positive thing is that today we can realize that a Mexican film it is positioned in the top 5 of the box office during more than one month and that Mexicans are taking into consideration that Mexican films can be enjoyed with the family, instead of going to see Transformers and that our films looks like something that are necessary to support. ~ Alfonso Herrera

I think the three Mexican directors - Alejandro Inarritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro - gave all of us foreign, and particularly Latino, directors a big break. ~ Patricia Riggen

My dad, as you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company. But he was born in Mexico ... and had he been born of, uh, Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot at winning this. But he was unfortunately born to Americans living in Mexico. He lived there for a number of years. I mean, I say that jokingly, but it would be helpful to be Latino. ~ Mitt Romney

Madame Ratignolle hoped that Robert would exercise extreme caution in dealing with the Mexicans, who, she considered, were a treacherous people, unscrupulous and revengeful. She trusted she did them no injustice in thus condemning them as a race. She had known personally but one Mexican, who made and sold excellent tamales, and whom she would have trusted implicitly, so soft-spoken was he. One day he was arrested for stabbing his wife. She never knew whether he had been hanged or not. ~ Kate Chopin

There are fourteen million people living in Mexico City. I'll never see the visceral realists again. And I'll never go back to the university or to Álamo's workshop either. I don't know what I'm going to tell my aunt and uncle. I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louys, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues. ~ Roberto Bolano

Question the images. Take them by the hand and don't let the sweet distancing they offer you vanquish you; do away with the distance's comfort or the soft indifference you derive from concentrating on the quality of the framing, the use of light and shadows, the successful composition. Force these images to bring you to the Mexican Southeast, to history, to the struggle, to this taking sides, to choose a faction. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

What mattered most, as I came to realize, was who'd lived in Vegas the longest, which was why the knock-down Mexican beauties and itinerant construction heirs sat alone at lunch while the bland, middling children of local realtors and car dealers were the cheerleaders and class presidents, the unchallenged elite of the school. ~ Donna Tartt

I have great relationships with the Mexican people. You've been seeing I'm winning every single poll in these primaries when they go out, when the polls come back in with the Hispanics. I have thousands of Hispanics that work for me and over the years tens of thousands that have worked for me over the years. I will tell you that the problem our country has is that our leaders are so weak - we have so many ways of getting the money to build the wall. ~ Donald Trump

If drugs were legalized in the US, the Mexican economy would collapse since the earnings from drugs bring in more hard currency than its largest licit source, oil sales. Mexico is a corrupt state that has now become dependent on the earnings on an illegal product. But inevitably, the product will become legal and then Mexico will retain its corruption but must face the needs of its citizens now employed by the drug industry who have become steeped in violence and conditioned to higher incomes. ~ Charles Bowden

A Mexican newspaper recently ran a story about how the Converse shoe company was making tennis shoes in China using Mexican glue. "The whole article was about why are we giving them our glue," said Zedillo, "when the right attitude would be, How much more glue can we sell them? We still need to break some mental barriers. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

'm constantly depressed by the Mexican gang members I meet in East L.A. who essentially live their lives inside five or six blocks. They are caught in some tiny ghetto of the mind that limits them to these five blocks because, they say, "I'm Mexican. I live here." And I say, "What do you mean you live here - five blocks? Your granny, your abualita, walked two thousand miles to get here. She violated borders, moved from one language to another, moved from a sixteenth-century village to a twenty-first-century city, and you live within five blocks?" ~ Richard Rodriguez

The dream I had was on a certain night. And in the dream the traveler appeared. What night was this? In the life of the traveler when was it that he came to spend the night in that rocky posada? He slept and events took place which I will tell you of, but when was this? You can see the problem. Let us say that the events which took place were a dream of this man whose own reality remains conjectural. How assess the world of that conjectural mind? And what with him is sleep and what is waking? How comes he to own the a world at night at all? Things need a ground to stand upon. As every soul requires a body. A dream within a dream makes other claims than what a man might suppose. ~ Cormac McCarthy

I grew up with white friends, Asian friends - Vietnamese, Chinese, Pacific Islanders. I had Hispanic friends, not just Mexican friends, but Guatemalan friends, Honduran friends, and we knew the difference, you know? ~ Ryan Coogler

Brittany Ellis, I'm goin' to prove to you I'm the guy you believed in ten months ago, and I'm gonna be the successful man you dreamed I could be. My plan is to ask you to marry me four years from now, the day we graduate.'And I guarantee you a lifetime of fun, probably one with no lack of fightin', for you are one passionate mamacita ... but I definitely look forward to some great make-up sessions. Maybe one day we can even go back to Fairfield and help make it the place my dad always hoped it would be. You, me, and Shelley. And any other Fuentes or Ellis family member who wants to be a part of our lives. We'll be one big, crazy Mexican-American family. What do you think? Mujer, you own my soul. ~ Simone Elkeles

Little by little, not without astonishment, I rediscovered the great names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who had been the master thinkers of my grandfather and other Mexican liberals. They did no offer me a doctrine or a catechism: they were and they are a source, an inspiration. ~ Octavio Paz

What we're doing - waving a "Keep Out!" flag at the Mexican border while holding up a Help Wanted sign a hundred yards in - is deliberate. Spending billions building fences and walls, locking people up like livestock, deporting people to keep the people we don't want out, tearing families apart, breaking spirits - all of that serves a purpose. ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

You will stumble on secrets. Hidden all over the restaurant: Mexican oregano, looking cauterized, as heady as pot. Large tins of Chef's private anchovies from Catalonia hidden behind the bulk olive oil. Quarts of grassy sencha and tiny bullets of stone-ground matcha. Ziplock bags of masa. In certain lockers, bottles of sriracha. Bottles of well whiskey in the dry goods. Bars of chocolate slipped between books in the manager's office.

And people too, with their secret crafts, their secret fluency in other languages. The sharing of secrets is a ceremony, marking kinship. You have no secrets yet, so you don't know what you don't know. But you can intuit it while holding yourself on the skin of the water, treading above deep pockets, faint voices underneath you. ~ Stephanie Danler

Charlie doesn't know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, she'll join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; she'll nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking. ~ Jennifer Egan

Amnesty International continues to report that extra judicial tortures and murders continue. This is not democracy that we are exporting to Mexico, and this is certainly not what the Mexican workers signed up for. ~ Stephen F. Lynch

Have you ever met a slave, Luke?" she asked. The question took me aback, coming from a black person. I stammered out a no. She said, "Really? You've never been to a mall? You've never watched shoppers with their carts piled with soda and microwaveable food? You've never stayed in a hotel where a fifty-year-old Mexican mother of six scrubs your shit stains off the toilet bowl? You've never watched TV for five hours straight? ~ Ryan Boudinot

Half of San Antonio's population is of Mexican descent; the other half just eats that way. ~ Mike Greenberg

You don't see Los Angeles erecting a museum dedicated to the birth place of the Crips and the Bloods and the Mexican Mafia, with a special guided bus tour highlighting the rise of the crack trade, yet you can hop on a bus in Chicago tomorrow to see the famous locales of murders. I have to imagine there's some wonderful academic book on the sociology of this out there. ~ Tod Goldberg

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

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have
officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona
have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now. ~ Sherman Alexie

When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican, half-black. Another one was from Colombia. Another one was born in the U.S., but his mom was from Germany and spoke with a German accent. So we all had multiple identities. ~ Dinaw Mengestu

The range of ingredients available to home cooks has expanded dramatically. People are incorporating herbs and spices like lemongrass, smoked Mexican chile, sumac, and za'atar mix. ~ Yotam Ottolenghi

Pot itself has nothing to do with pots and pans, but comes from the Mexican-Spanish word potiguaya, which means marijuana leaves. And marijuana is a Mexification of 'Mary Jane' for reasons that everybody is much too stoned to remember. ~ Mark Forsyth

The Mexicans have a fervent appreciation of poetry and make regular use of it. It occupies a high and ancient seat in the Mexican culture. The Aztecs called it "a scattering of jades," jade being what they valued most, far more than the gold for which they were murdered in great numbers by invading Spaniards. They felt that the more profound aspects of certain concepts, whether emotional, philosophical, political, or artistic, could be expressed only in poetry. ~ Linda Ronstadt

One of the most meaningful things that's happened to me since I've been the governor - the president - governor - president. Oops. Ex-governor. I went to Bethesda Naval Hospital to give a fellow a Purple Heart, and at the same moment I watched him-get a Purple Heart for action in Iraq - and at that same - right after I gave him the Purple Heart, he was sworn in as a citizen of the United States - a Mexican citizen, now a United States citizen. ~ George W. Bush

Mexican writer and diplomat, "Pasado en claro" ("A Draft of Shadows") You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Up in Illinois, we've forgotten what it's all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, tonight, heck, they're forgotten. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. Boy, that's lonely. That's really sad. But here-- why, shucks. It's both happy and sad. It's all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it's almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but that's no mind, they're THERE. It's like holding hands at a séance with your friends, but some of the friends gone. ~ Ray Bradbury

People ask me all the time, 'What keeps you up at night?' And I say, 'Spicy Mexican food, weapons of mass destruction, and cyber attacks.' ~ Dutch Ruppersberger

Top of the Shitberg
The first small turds that come out of you after getting stuffed on Indian or Mexican food.
You're thinking, 'Is that it?' and a minute later the Mt. Everest of shit comes out of your ass - requiring two courtesy flushes followed by a plunger.

Alternate meaning: A popular greeting among Jews living in Edwardian Dublin, when they met an the synagogue for morning services ~
'Top of the shitberg to you, Seamus Goldberg.'
'And a top of the shitberg to you, Leopold Bloom. ~ Beryl Dov

One of the great creations of Mexican Catholicism was the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe to a Mexican Indian, on the same hill where, before the Conquest, a pre-Hispanic goddess had been worshiped. Catholicism was able to take root in Mexico by transforming the ancient gods into the saints, virgins, and devils of the new religion. Nothing similar could occur in India with Muslim monotheism or Protestant Christianity, both of which saw the cult of images, of saints and virgins, as idolatry. The Christianity imported by the British was poor in rites and ceremonies, but full of moral and sexual rigidity. In other words: the exact opposite of popular Hinduism. Similarly, in Christian asceticism, the central concept is redemption; in India, it is liberation. These two words encompass opposite ideas of this world and the next, of the body and the soul. ~ Octavio Paz

By and large, the Mexican food in Paris is horrible. ~ Rosecrans Baldwin