Tomalin Mexico Quotes

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters. ~ Claire Tomalin

I mean I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort? ~ Rick Perry

She picked up the phone and dialed her partner. Several seconds later, she heard a deep husky voice at the other end. It was a recording.
"Rick Bonito here! Private investigator for the Moore Detective Agency! Leave a message, please."
"Hey, Rick!" said Amelia. "I've got an assignment for you that needs your expertise. Breaking and entering! Give me a call."
Amelia smiled after hanging up the phone. With that kind of message, she should be getting a return call soon. ~ Linda Weaver Clarke

And what's worse,' she went on, 'is that on Sunday we're going to get back onto a plane and go back to our houses and our TVs and our hot tubs and we're going to forget about all this.'
'No we won't, Laci. We won't forget'
She wiped her eyes and glared at me.
'Yes, we will. You say we won't, but after we get home we'll feel differently. It won't ever feel like this again ~ L.N. Cronk

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

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. ~ Claire Tomalin

The last we heard of him was a picture postcard from Mazatlan, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: "Hello - Goodbye!" and no address. ~ Tennessee Williams

What amazed me as much as anything were the fat calm tabby cats of London some of whom slept peacefully right in the doorway of butcher shops as people stepped over them carefully, right there in the sawdust sun but a nose away from the roaring traffic of trams and buses and cars. England must be the land of cats, they abide peacefully all over the back fences of St John's Wood. Edlerly ladies feed them lovingly just like Ma feeds my cats. In Tangiers or Mexico City you hardly ever see a cat, if so late at night, because the poor often catch them and eat them. I felt London was blessed by its kind regard for cats. If Paris is a woman who was penetrated by the Nazi invasion, London is man who was never penetrated but only smoked his pipe, dranks his stout or half n half, and blessed his cat on his purring head. ~ Jack Kerouac

When you arrive really inside the discussion of race, practically they institute a Mexican-ness, a Latin-ness, a racial community that just isn't true. So, we know who are the people that have the majority of power, access and privileges in Mexico, and they are white Mexicans. ~ Bocafloja

Tourism is a top priority activity for federal government, which is why it invests an average of over 2,500 million dollars a year in infrastructure works and integral projects that promote Mexico's culture and natural attractions. ~ Vicente Fox

There is something going on now in Mexico that I happen to think is cruelty to animals. What I'm talking about, of course, is cat juggling. ~ Steve Martin

He was given a ranch, and two lovely mistresses. 'Imagine, at thirty, I was put out to stud. And we Latins are such drowsy pigs that I almost fell for it. ~ Warren Eyster

She had aged with style and beauty. In soft romantic lighting, I could still see the magnificent girl from Mexico who had saved me with her love. When the lighting was less sentimental and somewhat more revealing, she was perhaps even more magnificent. The years had added a velvety richness to her physical beauty, a resonance to her inner loveliness that made her even more spectacular. She was a woman in every sense of the word, yet so much of the young girl remained in those dark and lovely eyes it made you feel young again too. ~ Bobby Underwood

Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says "Mexico," and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I grew up in Mexico, not the U.S., and the fact is that there just aren't any parts for Latin actresses. I have to persuade people that my accent won't be a problem, but an asset. ~ Salma Hayek

... it is estimated that approximately 95 percent of agricultural workers in the United States were born in Mexico, 52 percent of them unauthorized ~ Seth Holmes

To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations. ~ Octavio Paz

How can these stories from all over the world be so similar? I thought suddenly. I mean, when they were originally told all over those thousands of years ago, it wasn't like the Greeks could send an email to the Aboriginal people, or the Mayans in Mexico could talk on the phone to the Japanese. Could there actually be a bigger link between heaven and earth than I'd thought? ~ Lucinda Riley

The journey and excursions in Mexico which have originated the narrative and remarks contained in this volume were made in the months of March, April, May, and June of 1856, for the most part on horseback. ~ Edward Burnett Tylor

According to The Washington Post, the NSA has been monitoring phone calls and emails of people in Mexico. So apparently it's not enough to spy on American citizens, they feel they have to spy on FUTURE American citizens as well. ~ Jay Leno

La Zona is such a closed area, a dangerous, outlaw area. My time in the Zona was a time outside of society, almost out of the real world. And the girls there had such a sense of irony and sarcasm. They were also really interested in my film. They'd be like, "Thank God we live in Mexico, because our kind of prostitution has a heart. We wouldn't want to sit behind a glass cage or be sold by our own mothers. We have free will." ~ Michael Glawogger

The moon. There's no other moon like one on a clear New Mexico night. It rises over the Sandias and soothes the miles and miles of barren desert with all the quiet whiteness of a first snow. ~ Lucia Berlin

Mexico needs schools, rural development, and an independent judiciary, not high-tech weaponry. ~ Stephen Kinzer

Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings. ~ Claire Tomalin

(Native hygiene was far better than Spanish hygiene. When the Spaniards first arrived in Mexico, natives bearing incense burners were assigned to accompany them wherever they went. The Spaniards thought it was a mark of divine honour. We know from native sources that they found the newcomers' smell unbearable.) The ~ Yuval Noah Harari

When Carpenter was shooting 'Vampires' in New Mexico when I was living there, I desperately tried to get a job working on that film, and I couldn't. So my first job as a PA was on a CBS movie of the week that was shooting next door, and whenever I could, I would sneak over so I could watch. ~ Drew Goddard

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy. ~ Edward Abbey

My vision of the border with Mexico is that a truck from the United States going into Mexico and a truck coming from Mexico into the United States will pass each other at the border going 60 miles an hour. Yes, we should have open borders. ~ Gary Johnson

Casiopea, meanwhile, looked at a heavy silver bracelet with black enamel triangles, of the "Aztec" style, which was much in vogue and meant to attract the eye of tourists with its faux pre-Hispanic motifs. It was a new concoction, of the kind that abound in a Mexico happy to invent traditions for mass consumption, eager to forge an identity after the fires of revolution--but it was pretty. ~ Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I had a real job at fourteen years old. At seventeen, I was on my own. At twenty, I cut the liver out of a drifter and gave it to my father! 'Cause my dad's a drinker and I love my dad. And for eighty bucks, you can do anything in Mexico! ~ Christopher Titus

OUCH

"The arrabal (a term used for poor neighbourhoods in Argentina and Uruguay) and carpa (informal mobile theatre set up inside tents, once common in Latin America), with their caliente (hot) rhythms such as the rumba or the cha-cha-cha, were conquering audiences all over the world, a trend allegorised in song lyrics about their popularity among the French and other non-Latin Americans - "The Frenchman has fun like this/as does the German/and the Irishman has a ball/as does even the Muslim" ("Cachita") - even as they filtered in the presence of a blackness - "and if you want to dance/look for your Cachita/and tell her "Come on negrita"/let's dance" - denied in the official discourse of those Spanish=speaking countries wielding the greatest economic power in the region: namely, Argentina and Mexico, the latter of which would eventually incorporate Afro-Latin American culture into its cinema - although being careful to mark it as Cuban and not Mexican. ~ Robert McKee Irwin

In 1934, strongman Fulgencio Batista forced President Grau's resignation. Then in 1940, Grau lost his bid for the Presidency to his adversary Batista. Four years later in 1944, he did win the election and took office for a four-year term starting on October 10th. After Grau won the election and was the President elect, Batista still in office, blatantly attacked the National Treasury, leaving the cupboards bare by the time Grau was actually sworn in as President.
Since Grau and Batista were staunch adversaries, it is highly unlikely that any deal could have been made in 1946 to allow "Lucky" Luciano into Cuba, especially with Luciano having been exiled to Sicily by the United States government that preceding February. Still, Lansky had enough political pull within the Cuban government to prepare for a strong Mafia presence in Havana.
In October of 1946, in an attempt to keep his whereabouts a secret, "Lucky" Luciano covertly boarded a freighter taking him from Naples, Italy, to Caracas, Venezuela. Then Luciano flew south to Rio de Janeiro and returned north to Mexico City. On October 29, 1946, he arranged for a private flight from Mexico City to Camagüey, Cuba, where Meyer Lansky met him. Having the right connections, Luciano passed through Cuban customs unimpeded and was whisked by car to the splendid Grand Hotel.
Luciano, having just arrived in Cuba, was looking forward to setting up operations. Cuba would actually be a better place than the United States fo ~ Hank Bracker