109 quotes found
"¿En perseguirme, mundo, qué interesas? ¿En qué te ofendo, cuando sólo intento poner bellezas en mi entendimiento y no mi entendimiento en las bellezas?"
"Yo no estimo tesoros ni riquezas; y así, siempre me causa más contento poner riquezas en mi pensamiento que no mi pensamiento en las riquezas."
"Hombres necios que acusáis A la mujer, sin razón, Sin ver que sois la ocasión De lo mismo que culpáis: Si con ansia sin igual Solicitáis su desdén ¿Por qué queréis que obren bien, Si las incitáis al mal?"
"¿Cuál mayor culpa ha tenido En una pasión errada: La que cae de rogada, O el que ruega de caído? ¿O cuál es más de culpar, Aunque cualquiera mal haga: La que peca por la paga, O el que paga por pecar?"
"¡Qué bien se ve que eran Sabios en confesarse rendidos, que es triunfo el obedecer de la razón el dominio!"
"No se avergüenzan los Sabios de mirarse convencidos; porque saben, como Sabios, que su saber es finito."
"lady of mine and of all beloved women distant and hallucinated magician of verse, stranger to time, barefoot among the convents."
"Probably the first official feminist in Mexican history was Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz, who lived from 1648 to 1695. During her lifetime, she was honored as the tenth Muse of Mexico, and known through the Americas and Europe for her wit and intelligence. She argued against a sexual double standard in her famous poem, "Hombres necios" (Foolish Men): "Which has the greater/sin when burned/By the same lawless fever:/She who is amorously deceived,/Or he, the sly deceiver?/Or which deserves the sterner blame,/Though each will be a sinner:/She who becomes a whore for pay,/Or he who pays to win her?" Sor Juana argued for equality in education, but did not trust men to act as teachers. She suggested that a group of self-educated women should teach young females, instructing them not only in elementary subjects, but in literature, history, science, and theology as well."
"Just a few years ago, one could easily identify the women in all of Latin America who stood out in literature. Names like Gabriela Mistral, Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarború, Delmira Agustini, Claudia Lars, not to mention the greatest of them all, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who, five hundred years ago, took off her feminist gloves when she wrote, “Stupid men, who, without cause, accuse women,” words proclaimed rather shockingly."
"I don't pretend to be anyone's voice. I have been very lucky to be published in Europe, and I say lucky because there are women who have been writing in Latin America since the seventeenth century, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The problem is that few people ever talk about them. Their work is rarely taught at the universities, there is no literary criticism on them, and they are not published, translated or distributed."
"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was the first feminist on this continent"
"Her famous Reply to Sor Filotea (1693) defending her right to knowledge, is a major document in the struggle for women's intellectual independence; it was recently published in Barcelona as "The First Women's Manifesto." Sor Juana's poignant awareness of the suppressed potentialities of women makes her the first feminist of the New World and one of its greatest thus far."
"One of our first figures of note was a feminist Mexican nun turned poetess called Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. She was the wittiest writer in the Spanish language between the death of Calderón (1680) and the Romantic era."
"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."
"As we have seen, those inspired by divine inspiration were amazingly steadfast. To cite just one example, the Mexican nun Sor Juana de la Cruz, when chastised by her confessor for her presumption in writing verse, replied that she could not help it and could not control her ability to do so; it came naturally to her and therefore must be a gift from God. From this she reasoned that she was entitled to write verse."
"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz left behind many writings and, above all, inspiration for all women, for all time."
"The story of feminist Latinas spreads across centuries and is rich in heroines who demolish the stereotype of the "passive Latin woman." The landmarks are numerous in Mexico, from the openly feminist seventeenth-century intellectual Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, a nun, to the first feminist congress of 1911 and the suffrage movement of the 1930s."
"Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz became a model for my rebellion."
"Sor Juana defended her case for learned women and stated that women should be able to study if they wish. She cites learned Jewish and pagan women, as well as Christian; St. Catherine of Egypt, Ste. Gertrude, Ste. Paula, Ste. Theresa of Avila, among others. She also quotes part of the Bible in favor women's learning. She dared to argue and questioned St. Paul's meaning of 'Mulieres in ecclesia taceant, (let women be quiet in church.) Sor Juana spoke as to the wisdom of learning adding that unqualified men would be better off not studying since a little bit of learning can be dangerous in the hands of madmen. As an example, she cited the Heresiarchs, founders and leaders of a heretical sect."
"Although Sor Juana abandoned her writing, the calibre of the body of work she left Mexico remains unparalleled. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz soared as the most enlightened daughter of the new world. She challenged the foundation of the European Christian institution in her natural law perspective and understanding of the universe. Fearless, Sor Juana left the continent a mandate regarding the rights of women to think."
"Like other pioneer women in American history, Sor Juana Inès paved the road to education and intellectuality for women. To America, she left a vision of the woman of the future, a legacy that continues in the mind and spirit of future generations. Today, women learn and nurture the child of the true Humanity that exists within all of us. To Mexico, Sor Juana's legacy stands as the patria with a clearer vision of itself and its people; an identity that set the stage for independence. In her universal thinking, Sor Juana challenged the control and exploitation of Mexico by Spain's most archconservative institution, the Church."
"Some of the greatest Latin American poets have been women. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, María Sabina, and Violeta Parra are among them, but their true place in the history of poetry has yet to be fully acknowledged...Sor Juana, who was the principal poet of the Americas in the seventeenth century, fought for the right of women to write and paid with her life."
"I question whether feminism can be defined without saying that it harbors an idealist political philosophy that calls for a thorough transformation of our society, that seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct the world so that it is habitable for girls, women, and our queer futurity."
"My feminist idealism will not yield to pragmatism because it feels like giving up on the future we want to have and in which we want to live."
"To Freud's confusion on what do women want, I would say we want to dismantle a racist and misogynist heteronormative patriarchy that sucks the life out of women."
"The (Chicano) movement to me is now like a mosaic with all these little pieces. The little pieces are the ones that are now being activated so that a poet like Lorna Dee Cervantes is her own little miniature movement. Francisco Alarcón, Norma Alarcón, José Limón, all the people who are writing are carrying out the struggle against domination and subordination in the kinds of things they focus on-language, folklore, just anything."
"Poet and critic Norma Aiarcón tells us that "poetry has been the single most important genre employed by Chicanas in order to grasp and give shape to their experience and desire.""
"as Norma Alarcón has argued in another context, in uncritically accepting the terms of the film's logic, critics like Limón continue "to recodify a family romance, an oedipal drama in which the woman of color of the Americas has no 'designated' place" (1995, 42)."
"If autobiographical fictions by women in general have been seen to disrupt the lifelines of male Bildungsromane in the European tradition, these Chicana stories do double duty, contesting both traditional European models and male Chicano models of lifetelling. Taken as a whole, their narratives contest unified or essentialist concepts of Chicana identity as they construct what Norma Alarcón calls "subjects-in-process" through the textual narrative (1996, 135). Their individual stories delineate a complex map of an ever-changing imagined community, no less real in fiction, that is differentiated by gender, generation, sexual preference, class, race, and regional distinctions."
"My first collection: Una puertorriqueña en Penna came out of those years and the racism I experienced while being a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College. Some of the poems are also a defense of my Puerto Rican culture and language. It is sad to say that the poems were not accepted by a Latino publishing house at the time because I did not write "like a woman." In other words, I was supposed to write about flowers, gardening and domestic chores. This first anthology was amplified to be the final book, En el país de las maravillas, which my dearest Chicana sister, Norma Alarcón, agreed to publish as the first book from her established press: Third Woman. Third Woman Press gave me a platform from which to publish without pressure from the establishment on thematics. They also published my next two books: ...Y otras desgracias and The Margarita Poems"
"As a very young girl, I understood that the interior activities of the home are as significant as the exterior activities of society."
"Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family -- Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican -- and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it. And these expectations are not always in good relationship with our personal desires. I am always interested in that relationship between outer reality and inner desire, and I think it is important to pay attention to the inner voice, because it is the only way to discover your mission in life, and the only way to develop the strength to break with whatever familial or cultural norms are preventing you from fulfilling your destiny."
"I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico…She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. The smell of nuts and chilies and garlic got all mixed up with the smells from the chapel, my grandmother's carnations, the liniments and healing herbs."
"The only way to find peace is when you are not separated, when you are not fighting, when you part of the whole."
"As a teacher I realize that what one learns in school doesn't serve for very much at all, that the only thing one can really learn is self understanding and this is something that can't be taught. The law of love is what one really should be learning in school, and what I want to communicate to people is that they should disobey the social rules that do not pertain to them, they should rebel against what is not personally true."
"Diners seek in each bite, the flavor that takes them back to their childhood and the dishes that, with the passage of time, they stopped consuming."
"The word "love" is used far too frequently and far too imprecisely. It moves heaven and earth, it illuminates the purest of pages, but oh, with what ease it is pressed into service to mask the most infamous of passions, the vilest selfishness, and even crime!"
"A young man needs friends to serve as guides and counselors, confidantes and role-models. The mature man is capable of meaningful undertakings only when his actions are undergirded by the support of others. And the elderly seek strength in their time of weakness and, ultimately, in their struggle for survival, in companionship and affection. Even if there is love at first sight, there is no friendship that does not demand time and space to reach its perfection. The ancient proverb states, and rightly so, that two friends cannot truly know each other without having first shared a bag of salt."
"Friends dislike being apart. Separation, says Emily Dickinson, is all the Hell we need. Each shared moment is precious. And the only ones who can remember the hour of loneliness are those who survive it."
"He who has a friend lavishes benevolent actions on those around him."
"Veneration of our parents is seen in this light, not as an obligation difficult to fulfill, but rather as an easy inclination of our affection. We gratefully remember what we owe them: our existence, thanks to the love they expressed to one another, the care with which they watched our growth; and the gentleness and skill with which they guided us toward independence, responsibility, and the ability to make wise choices."
"Children, because of their helplessness, evoke our tenderness. But we must give them more than that: a vigilant sense of responsibility, an exquisite equilibrium between the extremes of exercising our authority and respecting their freedom. There is no greater satisfaction than a child who, when grown and at the age of accountability, is able to forgive us."
"Outside the family circle, friendship evolves into good will. In the workplace this allows us to manage without despotism, and to follow orders without resentment. In society we will learn to intervene without violence, but also without servility. And we will be able to look beyond the geographical borders of our own country, our customs, our race, our religious beliefs, and our political ideology to see that humanity is an attribute of all mankind."
"You may not be interested in hearing it, but I want to talk about it. To talk about them, rather: the forty-five years (exactly the number I have lived) as of today. I don't want to hide anything or misrepresent the date, like one covers up a gray hair or a wrinkle. No, each day has been worth what it has cost, and much more."
"Possibilities were available to me, doors were opened to me, all because of one government official's concept of justice and the consistency of his desire to see the law equally applied. I refer to Lázaro Cárdenas."
"The march, as you know, was not only to express their dissatisfaction but also to begin a strike against household chores-those jobs so sui generis, so unique that they are only noticed when left undone"
"Of course, there have been commentaries. And, of course, the gamut of these commentaries has been exactly what one might expect. From foolish outbursts and impudent plays on words to the rending of garments in the face of this new apocalyptic sign that heralds the decadence and perhaps even the death of our civilization and culture."
"I warn you that we Mexican women are taking due note of what is happening to our northern cousins and making ready for the day it becomes necessary for us."
"I've been at this long enough to realize that my column is like a mirror-a little mirror to which each Saturday I pose the question of who is the most marvelous woman on the planet."
"I tried what all children try in their desire to be noticed: tantrums and every sort of illness I could dream up. But since these were not successful, I found myself obliged to seek other means. And so it was that I came to write and publish my first verses. At ten years of age I was already perfectly installed as a poetess."
"I can say with Amado Nervo that "I loved and was loved and the sun caressed my face." But all of that happened in the School of Philosophy and Letters, in the halls that led from one classroom to another, from a lesson poorly noted, from a tutorial en route to a professional degree."
"in giving birth to Gabriel, I gave birth to myself as a mother-a role for which I was unprepared but which I try to carry out as best I can. Mother and poetess do not rhyme, but they go together rather well."
"I have confidence not so much in my own abilities as in the generosity of everyone else."
"Hablo no por la boca de mis heridas."
"Hechizada, contemplo el milagro de estar/como en el centro puro de un diamante."
"Nadie está solo. Nadie."
"¡Cómo canta la tierra cuando gira!/Canta la ligereza de su vuelo,/su libertad, su gracia, su alegría."
"no te bebas de un sorbo la alegría."
"No es posible sino soñar, morir,/soñar que no morimos/y, a veces, un instante, despertar."
"palabras que los vientos dispersan como pétalos"
"Heme aquí, ya al final, y todavía/no sé qué cara le daré a la muerte."
"sonríe ante un amanecer sin nadie."
"¿Qué se hace a la hora de morir? ¿Se vuelve/la cara a la pared?/¿Se agarra por los hombros al que está cerca y oye?/¿Se echa uno a correr, como el que tiene/las ropas incendiadas, para alcanzar el fin?"
"El otro. Con el otro/la humanidad, el diálogo, la poesía, comienzan."
"Lo que soñó la tierra/es visible en el árbol."
"ternura, la palabra pequeña, familiar/que cabía en mi boca."
"Adiós para la tierra que en mi torno bailaba."
"mi corazón, lugar de las hogueras,/y mi cuerpo que siempre me acompaña."
"He venido, feliz como los ríos,/cantando bajo un cielo de sauces y de álamos/hasta este mar de amor hermoso y grande./Yo ya no espero, vivo."
"El idioma salía de sus labios, como debe salir de todo labio humano, enrojecido de vergüenza. Y Rominka, al arrancarse la costra de sus pecados, lloraba. Porque duele quedar desnudo."
"El viento de las alturas huía graznando lúgubremente. Un sol desteñido, frío, asaeteaba aquella colina estéril."
"La seguridad de su vida era tan frágil que había bastado la cara de un chamula, vista al través de un cristal, para hacerla añicos."
"la visión turbia como si sus entrañas estuvieran latiendo en medio de las cejas."
"don Agustín, que no tenía afición por la copa ni por el tabaco, que había guardado rigurosamente la continencia, era esclavo de un vicio: la conversación. Furtivo, acechaba los diálogos en los portales, en el mercado, en la misma catedral. Don Agustín era el primero en enterarse de los chismes, en adivinar los escándalos y se desvivía por recibir confidencias, por ser depositario de secretos y servir intrigas."
"Su silencio le producía vergüenza, como si callar fuera burlarse de los otros. Y como un castigo inmediato crecía, junto a la vergüenza, una sensación de soledad. Teodoro era un hombre aparte, amordazado por un secreto."
"(who would you suggest we should be reading more among the women poets, especially in Latin America?) Well, she died already, but in Mexico, there was a poet called Rosario Castellanos. She was very good."
"Your verses were leafy trees, uncertain roads where the healers nested in the century plant."
"we see the surprising similarities between the renowned Mexican poet Rosario Castellanos and the young Peruvian poet Giovanna Pollarolo. The lyrical voices in this section subvert and rebel against routine; they speak about it as if it were a prison. The poets rebel through language which casts a light on and makes of their everyday lives a battlefield where objects become the signifiers of disorder and of liberty."
"Castellanos is one of the most brilliant writers of the last century, but when the Latin American boom in literature resounded in the United States, it was only the male voices that were heard."
"the Life/Death/Life forces are part of our own nature, an inner authority that knows the steps, knows the dance of Life and Death. It is composed of the parts of ourselves who know when something can, should, and must be born and when it must die. It is a deep teacher if we can only learn its tempo. Rosario Castellanos, the Mexican mystic and ecstatic poet, writes about surrender to the forces that govern life and death: “... dadme la muerte que me falta .../give me the death I need . . .” Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death."
"The brilliant Mexican Rosario Castellanos combines a philosophical outlook with a well-grounded historical perspective in both novels and poems, in which she employs complex striking imagery, as in "Daily Round of the Spinster," another treatment of the theme of the childless woman. A profound student of women's lives, she suggests, as in "Meditation at the Threshold," that the solution, not yet found, requires "Another way to be human and free./ Another way to be." Her powerful utterance opened the way to a new generation of women poets born after 1937, in different countries, but all with a clear apprehension of the contemporary woman's situation..."
"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..."
"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."
"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)"
"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."
"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."
"...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?"
"The exquisite roses that my father brought over yesterday have totally withered. I felt like I was them. How can he say he loves me if he doesn't care if I'm withering?"
""The way our people do it..." says my mother-in-law, and my mother says, "Our people do it differently because.." Well, if there are differences among the Jewish people, they must really be great between Jews and non-Jews."