160 quotes found
"Perhaps the Russians have done the right thing, after all, in abolishing copyright. It is well known that conscious and unconscious appropriation, borrowing, adapting, plagiarizing, and plain stealing are variously, and always have been, part and parcel of the process of artistic creation. The attempt to make sense out of copyright reaches its limit in folk song. For here is the illustration par excellence of the law of Plagiarism. The folk song is, by definition and, as far as we can tell, by reality, entirely a product of plagiarism."
"A little while ago, not much more than a few days ago, I was a child who went about in a world of colors, of hard and tangible forms. Everything was mysterious and something was hidden, guessing what it was was a game for me. If you knew how terrible it is to know suddenly, as if a bolt of lightning elucidated the earth. Now I live in a painful planet, transparent as ice; but it is as if I had learned everything at once in seconds."
"I’m more and more convinced it’s only through communism that we can become human."
"I'll be in Detroit two more weeks. I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn't know sad things now. After all I shouldn't complain because I have been happy in many ways though. Diego is good to me, and you can't imagine how happy he has been working on the frescoes here. I have been painting a little too and that helped. I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon. I am sure that in New York I will be much happier. If you still in the hospital when I come back I will bring you flowers."
"I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim."
"Until always and forever. Now in 1944. After all the hours lived through. The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion. With no other wish than to go on until they meet. Slowly. With great unease, but with the certainty that all is guided by the "golden section". There is cellular arrangement. There is movement. There is light. All centers are the same. Folly doesn’t exist. We are the same as we were and as we will be. Not counting on idiotic destiny."
"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best."
"I am a poor little deer."
"His [Diego Rivera's] supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface."
"I have suffered two grave accidents in my life, one in which a streetcar knocked me down... The other accident is Diego."
"Since Trotsky came to Mexico I have understood his error. I was never a Trotskyist."
"They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."
"I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint."
"Pies, para qué los quiero Si tengo alas para volar."
"I hope the exit is joyful and I hope never to return."
"I was fascinated by Papa's studio [he was photographer]. I would help him wash, crop and press photos and afterwards sell them, when we were poor. When I was in Prepa, [following college] they would send me to help my father when he had epileptic attacks. After school I would go to his office, which was downtown, and accompany him everywhere. I would also do my homework there, and he would help me. I remember the fear that Papa's epileptic attacks make me feel. Christina and I would hide under the bed. (9 September 1950)"
"I was really ugly [circa 8 a 10 years old] and had an admiration complex for Christi [her beautiful sister]. They sent us tot the ous of senora Maria a Campos for instruction.. .I asked about the mysteries of the Bible, and I think I behaved badly so they sent me to a retreat. It was the usual thing: "to dedicate oneself mor to God".. ..it was a house where one spent about fifteen days.. .I asked the priest so many questions about how Christ was born, and was the virgin really a virgin, that they threw me out. (9 September 1950)"
"I remember the first time I was sick. I had gone to play with a boy, Luis Léon, and on the patio he threw a wooden log at my foot, and this was the pretext they used at home when my leg began to grow thin. I remember they said that it was a white tumor or paralysis. I missed a lot of school [Frida spent nine months in bed, and at seven she wore (polio) booties]. I do not remember a lot, but I continued jumping, only not with the right leg anymore. I developed a horrible complex, and I hide my leg. I wore thick wool socks onto the knee, with bandages underneath. This happened when I was seven years old, and my papa and my mama begun to spoil me a lot and to love me more. The foot leaned to the side, and I limped a little. This was during the period when I had my imaginary friend. (9 September 1950)"
"..when I had my imaginary friend I would look out of the small glass panes of the window and fill them with steam. Then, I would draw a little window and go out through it. Opposite our house, there was a milk store that was named Pinzon, and I would travel from the little window through the "o" in Pinzon, and from there into the center of the earth, where I had my friend, and we would dance and play.. .I do not remember my friend's house, and she had no name. She was like me in age. She had no face. The truth is, I do not remember if she had a face or not, and she was very lively. I could not describe her. (9 September 1950)"
"I first met Diego [who became later her husband] while he was painting the amphitheater [at the Escuela National Preparatoria, where Rivera was painting the mural 'La Créación', 1922 -1923] and I would really cherish going to see him paint. Orozco [famous Mexican painter] was also painting [murals] in the Prepa, and I remember one time a group of kids wanted to scratch the paintings of Diego and Orozco.. .Every day we went for ice cream at a stand opposite the law school.. .Sometimes Diego himself would pass by, and we would tease him. One day they asked me who I wanted to marry, and I said I would not marry, but I did want to have a child by Diego Rivera. – (27 October 1950)"
"I was already interested in painting when I was about twelve. I was about fifteen when I began to draw. I have the first drawing, a self-portrait that I did in 1925 [in fact she did this self-portrait in 1927 and gave it to a grade-school friend and wrote above her drawn head: 'Here I am sending you my portrait, so you will remember me'] I began to paint after the [bus] accident, I made the self-portrait with the clouds [1926] and the portraits of Adriana Kahlo, Lira, Alicia Galant, Christina Kahlo and Agustin Olmedo. All, more or less, are from the same period. With the last ones, I was wearing the cast corset [because of her injury by the bus accident in 1925 with her boy-friend Gomez Arias]. I would get out of the bed and paint at night. (1950)"
"Papa painted small landscapes by the river in Coyoacán, and copied sentimental paintings in watercolour and oil. Afterwards, he gave me a little box of paints that belonged to him. Ángel Salas gave me a small book that told me how to prepare the canvases, and I made them smooth, smooth. The courtship with Gómez Arias lasted from 1922 until 1925, when the bus crushed us both. Gómez Arias brought me books on painting and painters from Europe. These were the first books on art that fell into my hands. (1950)"
"José Clemente Orozco [became later a famous Mexican painter as well] and I would travel on the same trolley from Coyoacán to Mexico City, and I would carry his papers. We became pals, and I invited him to the house. I had painted four or five things when he visited, and he gave me a hug and said I had a lot of talent, and he chatted on about the horrors of Diego [Rivera]. There was beginning to be talk about Diego; that he had returned from Russia and was giving talks on on Russian theater and art. I would go to hear him. Afterwards, he began to paint at the Prepa. [Escuela Prepatoria] and later at the Secretaríade Educación. I was studying at the Prepa, but the [bus] accident [in 1925] messed me up. (1950)"
"I returned to school [after the bus accident], but I felt very sore and had little strength. I took my paintings to Diego [Rivera], and he liked them a lot, most of all the self-portrait. But of the rest he told me that I was influenced by Doctor Atl [a Mexican painter and revolutionary] and by Montenegro, and that I should try to paint whatever I wanted without being influenced by anyone else. That impressed me a lot, and I began to paint that I believed in. Then the friendship and almost courtship with Diego began. I would go to see him paint in the afternoon, and afterwards he would take me home by bus or in a Fordcito – a little Ford that he had – and he would kiss me. (1950)"
"One Sunday, Diego came to the house to see my paintings and critiqued all of them in a very clear manner, and he told me all the possibilities he saw in them. Then I painted two or three things, which are around the house, that to me seem very influenced by him [circa 1928]. They are portraits of thirteen- or fourteen-year-old kids.. .In 1929, I joined the Communist Party, I got married to Diego, and I had my first abortion. In that year I painted a portrait of Cristina Moya.. ..and other drawings that Morillo Safa [her main patron] owns. The unfinished [self-]portrait of my first abortion was my first Surrealist painting ['Frida and the Caesarean', she painted in 1929] but not completely. I have it [at home]. (1950)"
"We [Frida and Diego] moved from the house on Reforma [street] to Coyoacán, and that had an enormous influence on me. How we painted the house and the Mexican furniture, all that influenced my painting a lot. While still on Reforma, I painted a self-portrait [Self-portrait 'Time Flies', 1929] that is owned by Morillo Safa. Once in Coyoacán I began to make paintings with backgrounds and Mexican things in them. I painted the portraits of Hale's sister.. ..and the one of Diego, which I did not finish [this painting is lost and was never documented before]. Those three paintings, who knows where they are. Mirillo Safa has the third self-portrait [her Self-portrait of 1930], showing me bald and sitting in a cane chair. (1950)"
"It's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you."
"A very common theme in [Kahlo's] work was fertility, fertility, fertility.. .In one painting, she draws pelvic bones. In another, a uterus is directly drawn. Another is showing the fetus. She's telling us what she's thinking about, but she never put her finger on what exactly was wrong."
"The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb."
"Who is a revolutionary woman? A revolutionary woman wants change, not mere cosmetic change but change to the status quo, and she is willing to sacrifice to make this happen. We have some extraordinary examples: Sojourner Truth, Las Adelitas, Frida Kahlo, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Dorothy Day, Malala Yousafzai, Coretta Scott King, and others."
"If I were a painter, I'd be Frida Kahlo."
"Although I knew about Frida Kahlo back in Mexico, she really wasn’t that famous back home. But in the US she was a superhero. Everyone used her as a symbol for many different things. And I started realizing that I wasn’t sure that the sense some people have about Frida in the U.S. was the one I had from her. I wanted to learn more about Frida Kahlo through my own perspective. So I had this idea for a while about creating a book about her. I also wanted to because she was a woman who, in the creation of her own identity, from how she dressed to what she did to her political activities—all of those things, were part of her own pride in who she was. And it was through creating this identity that she also was creating art. It wasn’t only because of her painting [that I was inspired]. She was very proud of her Mexican heritage, and she showed it in the way she dressed and all sorts of things. I had just come to the United States, a place where I didn’t know how I felt about my identity as a Mexican woman, and it was her pride that had an impact on me and made me realize that I had things to be proud of too."
"Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and a cultural worker. It's one the mainstream doesn't often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at age 98. (preface)"
"She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality."
"Look!, We have two eyes, two legs, we are the same as them, the only difference is that they play in Europe."
"Beg God that I don´t score a goal because I´m gonna leave a stain on you."
"For me the best players are in the poor suburbs, but the clubs are not interested."
"I don´t feel famous, I am the same as a waiter or anybody that works in the club, there are people with fame and money but no feelings, and thats what´s important."
"I will fight like a lion to retain my title."
"Vazquez is the fiercest opponent I have ever faced and I wear my super bantamweight championship belt with pride because I won it by defeating him."
"Poetry is a language with a shape"
"We read with our ears"
"What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer."
"A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world."
"Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities."
"Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it."
"Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination."
"Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it."
"The reader does not need a technical vocabulary to read poetry, only a voice in the head or out loud which can deliver the sounds."
"In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make."
"Objects do not depend on the concepts we have of them."
"How can we ask ourselves how can we ask ourselves?"
"If something has an explanation, you can explain it. If it has no explanation, you should explain why you cannot explain it."
"It is not that you cannot understand it, it is that you cannot compute it."
"Before being humans, we are animals."
"All ideas are valid in the context they were created."
"The only impossible thing is something to be impossible."
"Once you know the rules of the game, you can change them."
"The question is not whether something is wrong with subjectivity. We are embedded in it, so we can only deal with it, or be blind and attempt to ignore it."
"Nothing is free of its own limits."
"Philosophers get paid for posing interesting questions; scientists for answering them. Thus, one cannot live without the other..."
"All human relationships are based on misunderstandings."
"Winning or losing does not matter as much as what you learn from it."
"Knowledge brings more questions than answers."
"El sentido de la vida depende no de donde se encuentre uno sino de adonde se dirija."
"When we are children, we think that adults know how the world works. When we become adults, we know enough about the world to know that we know nothing about it..."
"We shouldn't see ourselves as ‘controllers' of the world, but as ‘actors' in the world."
"Science, as an institution, cannot be independent of human passions."
"All meaning is for an observer."
"A one-night-stander is someone who does not dare to explore the full potential of a relationship, just like a child who is afraid to go to the deep part of the pool. The latter does not want to learn how to swim, the former does not want to learn how to live."
"You shouldn't compete against others. You should compete against yourself."
"Everything can be seen as a system because there is nothing you cannot ."
"Disobey this phrase."
"Don't try to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself."
"Life is a constant adaptation."
"Who is stronger: the one who gives the blow, or the one who endures it?"
"Others are mirrors of one's soul."
"You should make life fit to you, not to make you fit life..."
"There is no game in which you cannot cheat."
"To know your limits you need to go beyond them."
"Every joy brings the sorrow of its absence in its wake."
"When I am a part of the herd I cannot see the stampede."
"Only misery is for free."
"Even if you do everything a woman wants, it will not be enough. But of course, this is no reason for not doing it."
"Life is not meant to be perfect."
"Tendencies tend to change."
"The easiest way to cope with complexity is not having it."
"People fear/hate other nations only when they don't know them."
"If only cars were fueled by road rage..."
"Science deals with epistemology, not with ontology."
"Finding your path is part of your path."
"The more I know, the better I realize how little we know."
"Just because it has always been that way does not mean that it will always be so."
"People fail to achieve goals not because of lack of abilities, but because of lack of determination. (any ability can be learned)."
"I do not make any ontological claims. The moment you speak about them, they are already epistemology."
"All violence stems from fear"
"Well, I like people a lot. I could define myself as a pacific being, a lover of nature, music and people. The qualities that I admire the most in the human being is the capacity of getting along with its similars in holy peace."
"What I hate the most in the world is injustice. Unfortunately, there is a lot of injustice in the world. Once we understood the mission that God gave us in this earth that is to sing to love, try to repeat his word, spread his word, because there is no other thing that we do but sing to love, tell people to be happy. Not to hurt each other, hit each other, kill each other."
"The couples I married, I never chose them, they did."
"For three years I was immersed in a depression, I did not know how to assimilate the loss of my voice, which was a reality."
"Those who have had the opportunity to be rescued from an addiction, whatever it is, we are obliged to talk about this and work together to let people know how to get out of it."
"I was a depressive and self-destructive alcoholic, but I was lucky enough to meet the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and be rescued by it 15 years ago."
"To have simple structures and organizations with minimal hierarchical levels, with human development and in house training of executive functions. To have flexibility and speed in making decisions. Operating with the advantages of the small business, which are what comprise big businesses."
"I'm not a teetotaler. People know that I like to have my drinks. Specially when I go to work. I don't like to get drunk. I don't go out drunk. I never would, for respect to the audience. But sometimes I have a drink. I am a very nervous person, extremely nervous. So to calm me down, I like having a drink before going on stage."
"I believe in loyalty."
"I don't like feeling lonely... but in solitude one can get to revalue many things."
"I don't know, I think that the eyes, I like eyes very much."
"Oh dear God, one misses the land when is far away."
"Well, I am so far, and you put me a bottle of tequila here."
"No, well, first of all let me tell you that it is carefully, because you never know when the little elf of the bottle is going to get out of it and will hit you with it and will let you watching little stars."
"Well, I actually don't know him personally. I would like to, he is very handsome."
"I have so much respect of his talent, his passion, the strength of his voice."
"¡Qué pasó qué pasó vamos ay! (Spanish for, What happened what happened, let's go!)"
"No hay trabajo malo... lo malo es tener que trabajar. (Spanish for, There is no bad work ... the bad thing is having to work.)"
"Yo le voy al necaxa... (Spanish for, I'm going to the necaxa...)"
"Y no te doy otra nomas porque.... (Spanish for, And I do not give you another one because ...)"
"Cosa bonita, cosa bien hecha, cosa hermosa. (Spanish for, Pretty thing, thing well done, beautiful thing.)"
"Tenía que ser el Chavo del Ocho. (Spanish for, It had to be the Chavo del Ocho.)"
"De todos modos yo ya estoy acostumbrado a recibir los golpes que me da la vida. (Spanish for, Anyways I'm already used to receiving the blows that life gives me.)"
"I consider animal rights also very linked to human rights and to environmental rights. For me it's just one issue."
"We’re both vegans and living a vegan lifestyle is important to us but we think it’s more important to get the message out there about what that industry creates. We’re not trying to make everyone turn vegan, we’re just trying to raise awareness – we’ve worked with PETA and many other big organisations – it’s more about connecting all the societies in the world and getting that information out there."
"Be proud of me, bro...and be proud of being an American."
"In his parents' home, on his bedroom walls hung only three items - a copy of the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp graduation certificate... Yes, Virginia, there are still heroes in America, and Sgt. Rafael Peralta was one of them. It’s just too bad the media can’t recognize them."
"I received an email for a casting call from Aeromexico specifying that they don't want anyone dark-skinned. Tsss."
"Trolls did what they do. All kinds of harassment: death threats, rape threats, everything.But after terrorist attacks from then on, they would post my picture. Whenever anything happens in Europe, they do it.The first time it happened, it was disturbing but now I feel bulletproof. It was something new, something I didn’t know they did. Luckily nobody who knows me thought it was real."
"I broke Mexican internet."
"Every time there is an attack I am sure there will be a few pictures of me around. The last time it happened I knew that a picture was being shared before I knew about the attack. I think there's a few people controlling a lot of accounts. Their attacks are coordinated and sometimes they make sense and you might get a feeling about how they're connected to the political situation in Mexico. Sometimes it's just hate."
"In Mexico, a striking majority of station guardians and policemen are men and they dissuade you from reporting harassment.If you go and tell them, many would tell you "think twice, are you sure that was harassment?", "do you really want to spend half a day at a police station to report it?""
"thanks to @plaqueta [De Anda’s Twitter handle] a lot of women are now aware of Article 23 of the Civic Culture Law"
"…there was the portrait of John the Baptist draped in furs, with a long furry beard, long hair, bushy eyebrows, and so covered in hair. Well, to a child of I must have been, I'm like four or five now, and this would have been one of our return trips because to a child of that age, it could very easy look like a gorilla. And one of the reasons I mention this story is that, for me, my first impression of art was both horrifying and absolutely magical, because I really believed that was a gorilla…"
"…I think Disney personifies some of the American ideals in art and in culture in total, because what he was trying to do and specifically with Fantasia. And it was the spirit of the thirties, I believe; it was the post-Depression period, where people were trying to think popular art, art that was consumable by the masses high art that could be put in a tin or another form, a package…"
"At some point in our lives, each of us realizes how really finite we are. For me this realization has been a driving force in my creativity and in my life in general. I paint with a new abandonment almost trying to deny the fact that I too will someday pass on and the only thing remaining will be the images that I leave behind."
"Just to really embrace who they are. What I feel has been working for me right now is just the fact that I embrace who I am. I embrace my culture and where I come from. You have to be very patient and very positive and never lose your hope. It's hard. I know a lot of people who just bail on their careers. If you really analyze it, there are so many people in the world, and only a couple make it as actors. You just have to focus on the positive."
"I don’t really like to talk about politics, I just find it hilarious…. You know I’m very proud of where I come from and my heritage. I know that we’re a very hard-working culture, we work so hard to be where we are. We are disciplined, we are determined. I just really get offended when people try to mock us in any way because I don’t find it hilarious in any way. Because it’s a struggle. The struggle is real, let’s say that."
"A writer is always so conflicted about their work, so it was liberating to be able to be in this space of my words, without being judgmental or changing anything. I vividly remembered the ideas that I had, where I was when I had them, how I imagined this moment of holding this book, I was emotionally connected to it. I reflected on the story of my arrival, and then my time as a young woman. I cried during the scene of my rape, and I found myself rooting for my character as I read on! I laugh about it now because I am the character, she is me! The process of narrating completely transformed my relationship to the memoir, even after I never imagined that it would."
"Imagine this story as if you were telling it to your mother. I always write with this in mind. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily work when writing a memoir, but it helps to focus on telling the story to one person. I didn’t have an image of a reader, per se, but I knew that I had to use my voice to connect to them. When you connect to somebody’s writing, it is powerful because it is such an intimate experience, but imagine an added element—the element of your voice. You can use your own voice to exude sensuality, anger, love, raw emotions. I go into the studio a lot, so doing this wasn’t particularly hard for me. I just close my eyes and go into a space."
"The hardest part of my narration was when I read about my assault. I cried. It took me a while to get through it, maybe because of the way I wrote it. It was very graphic and one of the parts of the book that I wrote while crying. It felt like the scab was off, and I was diffing deeper into my wounds when I talked about this moment and others.…"
""Numbers are prophets that look backwards (in time)". (Spanish: "Los números son profetas que miran hacia atrás".) Milenio Newspaper (October 29, 2021)"
""To know the baseball player who is alive, you need to know the baseball player who is dead". (Spanish: "Para conocer al pelotero vivo, tienes que conocer al pelotero muerto".) Milenio Newspaper (October 29, 2021)"
""Football has 14 variants; baseball has millions". (Spanish: "El futbol tiene 14 variantes; el beisbol, millones".) Milenio Newspaper (October 29, 2021)"
""There's no defense against the walk". (Spanish: "Contra la base por bolas no hay defensa".) Milenio Newspaper (October 29, 2021)"
""Baseball is too good a business to be a mere sport and too much of a sport to be a mere business". (Spanish: "El beisbol es demasiado negocio para ser un simple deporte y demasiado deporte para ser un simple negocio".) Milenio Newspaper (October 29, 2021)"
""The greatest ballplayer was Ty Cobb". (Spanish: "El más grande pelotero de la historia ha sido Ty Cobb".) Milenio Newspaper (October 29, 2021)"
""Being a Tigres del Mexico baseball fan, by definition, is deciding to walk on a rocky path rather than a smooth one; they know the euphoria of victory, and the heartache of seeing their team leave its place of origin. Being a Tigres del Mexico baseball fan is the story of joyful painfulness and painful joyfulness." (Spanish: "El aficionado al Tigres, por definición, ha decidido caminar por el empedrado en lugar de la plana vereda; conoce tanto la euforia de la victoria, como el dolor de ver a su equipo irse de su lugar de origen. Ser del Tigres, es la historia del placer sufriendo, y del llorar gozando.) Pedro Septién circa 2005"
"I was always very inquisitive and I wanted to ask questions about everything and how nature works and all that. But [my mother] came from this background where women were mostly supposed to get married and have a family and not really have a career, and she told me it would be difficult to get married if I pursued a career in math or science. My teachers were unfortunately not much better. They told me that physics was for geniuses, and...that it was not a very feminine career."
"[A fellow female student and I] basically confronted the administration and said that we were wondering why there was so few women that graduated from the program and so people started giving us the statistics and we became sort of known for sort of digging in and researching a little more to help women advance. We created the Association for the Advancement of Women in Physics. That's when (one of the professors I interviewed) told me, "Looking at all these stats I realized that we've never had another student from Mexico. If you finish the program you'd become the first one.""
"Physicists tend to train very well to solve problems and to think on your feet. To not be intimidated by the problem."
"My advice would be to not let anyone tell you or anyone stereotype, tell you that you can't pursue your career and dream in STEM. Really just practice, practice, practice, because that's what will eventually lead to success."
"When I played golf in Arizona, I noticed I was at a good level and I could compete against the best in the world. I became a professional player and got closer to my dream"
"When I noticed that my priorities changed, I was very excited to get marry and have kids. It was clear to me that I had to retire. It was very nice because I made a decision for the right reasons. I retired in Morelia, Mexico while we played a very important tournament, it was in my country, my people, my friends and sponsors, it was beautiful, she smiled."
"...it’s an idea of displacement that has animated my work. I get bored always doing the same thing. On top of that, I have no interest in purity or fidelity to a genre or a tone or a single channel of exploration. I’m not careful. I think that maintaining one foot outside the tradition we belong to is a good thing. And even if it weren’t, I’d do that regardless. That impulse arises from a restlessness within me that’s manifested in many ways over the years. All digressions eventually become a different peephole through which to glimpse that displacement I’m talking about. Displacement has marked my destiny: family displacement and also creative displacement. Imagine, how could you not love Judeo-Spanish (which had not appeared in my previous work): a language made from geographic, linguistic, and family displacements . . ."
"What I find is never definitive—that would be a pretension and an idiocy."
"Catharsis consists in getting out from under something that’s been there constantly, buzzing around irksomely in your ear. And, when you do that, there’s a certain state of emptying that almost immediately initiates another disturbance. If it were any other way, it wouldn’t be possible to keep writing."
"The debt I have with my heritage becomes a declaration of love for what I’ve lost..."
"A language is historical memory. Sometimes it preserves information and turns of phrase that people have forgotten, but the language doesn’t forget. In the case of the Sephardic community, language served as a binding agent that linked men and women across faraway geographies, carrying those words like an unconscious and pleasurable way of remaining united."
"Identities can be an obstacle and a source of conflict between people and nations when they are erroneously carried like a flag. But it’s a different story when we recognize that nothing makes us better as beings in the world than our differences."
"Ladino is a unique cultural and linguistic phenomenon. I think that well beyond the question of community belonging, it’s tremendously interesting for any Spanish speaker. To listen to its words is like seeing your own language in its infancy, and even earlier: in a nascent state. This language was spoken for five centuries by people who were totally distant from Spanish. That is, the mother tongue of all those speakers could be Turkish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Italian, Greek, French, Romanian, etc. Doesn’t it seem unique that they’d speak their mother tongue in the street and inside their homes they’d switch to this archaic Spanish? The biography of Judeo-Spanish is wonderful and tragic. Whether or not it has a future is up for debate, occasionally between very antagonistic positions. Listen, it’s hardly used by anyone at this point. The last speakers of the language are dying. There are many academic initiatives seeking to preserve it, and there are also isolated writers, but as you know, a language does not stay alive by decree. What is indisputable is that there should be some kind of souvenir—sound-based, literary, or poetic—marking its passage through the world. It makes me sad to talk about that. It’s as if I were beside a beloved person on their deathbed. I don’t know. There are surely other opinions on the matter. There are those who think it won’t die. I’d like for them to be right, but if there aren’t kids anymore who hear it daily, if it’s not used by anyone other than a handful of older people, how could it stay alive, then?"
"We realize that we are all brothers and sisters and that together we must build a cleaner, more beautiful city"
"At times man falls prey to man himself."
"His learning was extensive, covering theology, canon law, philosophy, mathematics, and letters, to which was added an exceptional gift of oratory."