49 quotes found
"The facade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New."
"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
"The North American world blinds us with its energy; we cannot see ourselves, we must see you."
"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
"If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let's all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best."
"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them."
"No government functions without the grease of corruption."
"[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."
"Can you imagine me coming to this country to blow up a post office? I told them, "My bombs are my books.""
"A tropical Mussolini"
"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, [[Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy."
"I admire him a lot. He has done a lot to bring the Latin American situation to the American consciousness."
"Cortázar is the one who is closest to my way of understanding the act of writing. And nearer to my heart. I admire Carlos Fuentes on the opposite extreme of the equation. That is why I wrote a book on both of them, Entrecruzamientos: Cortázar/Fuentes."
"There is nothing easier for my people than that quick show of grief."
"Without his walks, the evenings were not the same, and my sidewalks were full of fruit husks, peanut shells, and ugly words."
"For the majority of readers, Latin American fantastic literature operates under the tutelage of the great masters: Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez. However, although few are acquainted with their works, many women began experimenting with this genre well before their male counterparts and were the true precursors of the form, though their names remained on the shelves of oblivion, without the recognition that they deserved. María Luisa Bombal, for example, wrote the fantastic nouvelle, House of Mist (1937) before the famous Ficciones (1944) of Borges, and the Mexican, Elena Garro, wrote Remembrance of Things to Come (1962) before the publication of García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)."
"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."
"here’s a very short list of Latin women novelists I think should have been considered part of the Boom…Mexico: Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos..."
"You had grown and were strong and handsome; I was always in your shadow, with no light of my own and no one to discover me."
"Most men worry about leaving their fleeting shadow on the slippery surface of history, but I knew that my life had already been lived and that I only repeated an ancient and unjust tale."
"Every day that I said nothing the silence became more and more necessary. The silence was as still as stagnant water. The silence stung like sudden hailstones. The silence sowed doubt and created words which were never spoken."
"Who holds sway, the gods or man? I couldn't pray to the gods because I was going to be impure, but man, the man who slowly climbed the stairs, filled me to overflowing"
"Thus it is that the man who invokes the dragon becomes his slave and has to feed the swollen belly and its insatiable appetite. Because the dragon promises him everything but demands everything of him."
"It happens that one day the children begin to draw, and everything that was missing in that narrow, enclosed world begins appearing on scraps of paper gathered from any corner. Red suns, houses with doors and windows with cheery curtains, smoking chimneys and roads bordered with flowers which lead to the house and tall trees in the background. Boys and girls who jump and play; even dogs and cats and birds and butterflies, especially butterflies. Great blue flowers stuck on the walls. Sunlight overflowing everywhere. But this is not tolerated. It is not possible to create light in a dark world. A smile is not permitted. The dragon brings total blackness."
"what can be affirmed is too limited, too small. The not is much more imaginative; prohibition inspires inquiry. ("This is Not a Prologue")"
"Sometimes you have to exaggerate to rectify, to adjust and upgrade the vision ("This is Not a Prologue")"
"If the 20th century was the century of disillusionment, as I have called it, the 21st is that of absolute stupidity. Of delirious futility. Of frenetic destruction. Of dumbing-down the mind. Of utter sloth and, therefore, incompetence. Of lying sprawled out on the couch. Of feet up on the table. Of troglodytism. Of amnesia. But not magnesia. Of the electronic internet revolution. Everything within easy reach of the keyboard and the docile finger. An homage without further ado to the obliging finger. It will have to change its look, wipe off its unique fingerprint in exchange for a collective one. (beginning of "A Stroll Through the 20th Century")"
"The guts and the skin. The innocent and the prudish. Writing from the gut: about the unseen, the unknown, the absolute mystery. Not about the skin, the superficial, the visible. Do away with hot topics. Never what's expected, the facile, what sells. The prostituted. Yes, to the individual, the unique, the shockingly rare. That terrifying thing: the other, not what is the same. (beginning of "The Guts and the Skin")"
"They were but one page, one paragraph, one line, one word, one sound in history's great book of mix-ups. (p94)"
"silence is the most priceless music of all. (p101)"
"And so, through reading, distance in time and space becomes one. Memory is the necessary guide, the one that settles conflicts, the one that fills in the gaps. The great warehouse of forgotten things that are one day recovered. Amid the dust and spiderwebs, the mists establish their kingdom without the least haste. Just wait a while, and they clear away. (p112)"
"A dearth in published literature exists despite the multitude of noteworthy female authors who share the Latin American Jewish identity; writers like Angelina Muñiz, Clarice Lispector, and Margo Glantz. The long-time omission of these authors from anthologies likely reflects how they have historically been afforded less recognition and renown than their male counterparts."
"To Angelina Muñiz Huberman, who showed me a secret threshold of words and beauty..."
"The poetry of Angelina Muñiz Huberman of Mexico retains a rhythm anchored in the ineffable "unpronounceable word without echo in the sanctuary.""
"for Literature in Contemporary Sephardic writers in Latin America include Ana Maria Shua in Argentina, Isaac Chocrón in Venezuela, Ruth Behar in Cuba, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, and Rosa Nissan in Mexico, and Victor Perera in Guatemala. They write about Jewish life-Sephardic and otherwise in the modern world."
"Her work is influenced by the stories and essays of Jorge Luis Borges and by the culture of Spain's "Golden Age," in particular, by the works of Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora."
"Zoom and other outlets deform our images, making us lose our actual bodies, and with the possibility of contacting each other this way—we become holograms, or ghosts like Justine from Bioy Casares’s great novel, The Invention of Morel."
"One of the first things that occurs in totalitarian regimes, as we saw with research, such as Hitler and Stalin et al., is the act of abhorring culture, of banning and burning books."
"In Y por mirarlo todo, nada veía, I tried to show how the meaningless proliferation of news and the almost endemic impossibility of ranking and practicing irony contaminate and disable us in our efforts to keep a healthy mental distance."
"All of us, no matter whether noble or not, have our own family trees. (Prologue)"
"Perhaps what attracts me about my Jewish past and present is an awareness of its vividness, its colour and its grotesqueness, the same awareness that makes real Jews a minor race with a major sense of humour, with their ordinary cruelty, their unfortunate tenderness and their occasional shamelessness. (Prologue)"
"my brother-in-law says I don't seem Jewish, because Jews, like our first cousins the Arabs, hate images. So everything is mine and yet it isn't, and I look Jewish and I don't and that is why I am writing this- my family history, the story of my own family tree. (Prologue)"
"Time is a space marked out and filled with the ceaseless chanting of prayers by which a devout Jew measures his life."
"It doesn't matter much whether you're a Jew or not, what matters is whether you're willing to fight against the herd instinct. (13)"
"Living with someone probably means losing part of your own identity. Living with someone contaminates (36)"
"Is the pleasure of remembering somehow debilitating? Maybe memory gets weakened by being handled and stretched so much. Memories return so often and we stay hooked onto some event or other... (37)"
"There is no such thing as a race without its own cooking. Or even without its daily bread. (43)"
"Along with a funny and enchanting memoir of her Jewish family's migration to Mexico, Margo Glantz has given us in The Family Tree an exploration of what it means to belong to two worlds and how it can enrich our own identity if both of these worlds intertwine."