women-from-spain

"I love having the gift of friendliness, because thanks to that gift, I've been able to talk about Jesus to those around me. Now I wouldn't change my relationship with God, which in the end required me to distance myself from many things in my life that weren't coherent. The secret of my happiness is my faith. It's in knowing that living in this world is tough, but that God sees everything, and if He permits it, one day I will be with Him."

"Stereotypes stick in the mind like parasites: it's easier to increase a country's GDP per head twelvefold – in the last 40 years Spain's has gone from $2,413 to $29,651 – than to eliminate our neighbours' prejudices about us...It's true that until relatively recently Spain was chauvinistic and backward, yet it's equally true that there have been dramatic changes in the last 40 years...The fact is that Spain is no longer notable for its machismo, when compared with its European neighbours."

"The art path leads you to be increasingly free. That’s what you do. Maturity happens because of being increasingly free...to be truly free, you have to break free from internal and external pressures. The things that restrict the freedom of writing are thousands, from the fear of hurting someone to the will of pleasing someone . . . a lot of things. And you actually have to erase the self completely and become a sort of medium, let the story pass through yourself and let the story dance with you."

"one of the most widespread mirages is to think we are not going to be like the other old people, we will be different. But, then, age always catches you and you end up being equally shaky, unstable and drooling."

"I will say there are two authors I consider my teachers, one on the most realistic side and the other one in the most fantastic side: one of them is American, Ursula K. Le Guin...and the other one is half American, Nabokov, although his Russian ancestry and his Russian works also influence me a lot."

"For me, fiction belongs to my inner being, is something essential which defines me—I am a fiction writer in the same way I am a woman, the same way I am dark-haired—it is something essential and structural. It’s like an exogenous skeleton that keeps me going. And I don’t know how I would manage to live without writing, working with words. But they are two extremely opposite genres; let’s say as essays are to poetry. In particular, within journalism, clearness is a value. The clearer and less misleading a work of journalism is, the better. In a novel, ambiguity is a value. The more readings a novel has, even contradictory, the better. In journalism, you talk about what you know; you have provided yourself with records, you have gathered information, you have performed interviews. In a novel, you talk about what you don’t know, because the novel comes from the unconscious. They are very different relationships with words and with the world. In journalism, you talk about trees; in the novel, you try to talk about the forest."

"The print journalism I do, reporting, is a literary genre as any other, and it can also be as sublime as any other."

"You can’t make a living out of fiction writing. You can’t and you shouldn’t. I always tell everyone that is a huge mistake, because I have seen many writers get lost because of that. Novels should be an area of total freedom. It is already difficult to fight against the market pressure, against the pressure from your friends, your family, your editors, against the pressure of your own ambitions. All of that is already a fight. If you also have to earn money to pay for the mortgage, it’s fatal."

"By being completely free, totally erasing the self, you can dance well, you can make love well, and you can write well."

"I have the feeling . . . no, the conviction, the certainness that reality and fiction are really mixed up. The frontier between reality and fiction is tremendously porous and slippery."

"what we can control is how we respond to what happens to us, what we do with what happens to us. Even if the range of choice is minimal, there is always a choice...Even in that tiny little range of choice, you can choose. So, from that point of view, destiny is our battlefield. It’s not a tragedy; it is what we do with it."

"I believe in twinship—in my novels there’s lots of twins—and it’s exactly about that. It’s about all of the possibilities of our own being that we leave behind because one of the things that troubles me the most in life, that upsets all of us, is that we reach this world with the capability to be anything. But then life starts to confine us inside our small realities. And then, the shadow of those other possible lives stays to lurk us, which also sticks to you and you can’t shake it off, since it was so easy, it’d have been so easy to lead another life. We make twenty thousand small choices a day, and maybe one of those choices is the one that will take us to a completely different life. If you stop to think about it, it is vertiginous, hypnotizing and distressing. So, twins represent the other possible lives you could have led, which you drag behind you some way, in a ghostly way."

"The relationship between the human being and the flesh has always been a matter of huge conflict. Since the beginning of time every religion has tried to take control of our selves, usually from a repressive point of view, most often than not inhibiting the body as well. Other times, on the other hand, as in certain eastern liturgies, empowering the body and doing away with the ego. But living inside this body never ceases to be a conflict. We are cultural beings and that clashes with our animal instincts. That’s where the title [La Carne] comes from...In the first place, the flesh is what traps us, because no one has ever chosen his or her body to live in, has he? You are what you are and you didn’t get to choose it. It’s the flesh that traps us in the first place, the flesh that makes us sick, that makes us old and that eventually ends up killing us. But at the same time, it’s that glorious flesh that enables us to scratch heaven through sensuality, through sex, through passion. Paradoxically, the flesh that kills us will also make us feel eternal for a brief moment because that’s what we are in passion, eternal—we abandon ourselves, we merge, we give ourselves to the other, so much that when we are loving passionately, death doesn’t exist."

"At any given time, if you live long enough, old age catches you...the only choices we have in life are either the impairment of old age or early death."

"The truth is you do not choose the stories you tell, but stories choose you. You do not choose, therefore, characters either. Novels are like dreams you dream with your eyes open; they are books which appear in your head with the same apparent immediateness as they appear in your dreams at night. A writer always writes their obsessions and the truth is that all throughout life we end up writing the same thing in different ways. I am a tremendously existentialist writer; a contemporary novel is a novel that is very much marked by death, but mine is even more than the average one. Then all my books speak in a very obsessive way about death and the passing of time and what the time does to us or undoes to us, because our lives mean us being undone over time."

"Kids are the ones who create; I find it really great to have my inner child still alive."

"When you look at the list and see certain names, you don’t really know the criteria to choose from, but I dedicate myself to my business, to meet my personal goals, which are what make me more satisfied. I don’t have to wait for anyone to recognize what I do, I am the one who has to be satisfied and proud of myself."

"I think the most important thing is for a person to be happy and to be good where they are, not the money."

"The best players are intelligent, able to read the game, anticipate things,”"

"Psychology is a fundamental tool for everyone, although not everyone can afford it."

"I feel the social responsibility that comes with being a woman, my mother has it, you have it. The fact of being a woman means you have a social responsibility because in history, amongst all of them, they have brought about change such as women's suffrage etc. Now we are fighting for equal opportunities, valuing a person regardless of their sex and that is important for all women, that we are all conscious of that whatever our profession may be. Ours, even more so because I have not had female role models. Girls today see that they have named several Barça players as the best in Europe and the most important thing is that these girls have the opportunity to do the same. There is still a way to go."

"It's important to improve condition for women's player."

"We do not set limits."

"I must confess that I wasn’t aware of where I was playing until it was over."

"The captain is the first to make a commitment to the objectives that are set internally, they have to lead by example to reinforce that."

"Fame is just another thing you have to deal with. My life has changed in the last year and it’s still changing, but I’m just concentrating on what I do every day. The rest doesn’t bother me."

"I won’t risk the years I have left to play."

"We have to do exercises to normalize the fact that there is a football, which is played by men and women, and above all to report a lot because it is difficult for me to find information about when it is played. The day I get an interview and can talking about football is that we have achieved it (the normalization of women’s football)."

"But when you put in the work and people have faith in you, the results come. That’s how it has been for me."

"My tribulations are so great, my life so disturbed by the plans daily invented to further the King's wicked intention, the surprises which the King gives me, with certain persons of his council, are so mortal, and my treatment is what God knows, that it is enough to shorten ten lives, much more mine."

"Nature wronged her in making her a woman. But for her sex she could have surpassed all the heroes of history."

"Did I not tell you that whenever you argue with the Queen she is sure to have the upper hand?! I see that one fine morning you will succumb to her reasoning and cast me off!"

"My most dear lord, King and husband, / The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and a year more, lest they be unprovided for. Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things. / Katharine the Quene."

"Sir, I beseech you for all the love that hath been between us, and for the love of God, let me have justice and right. Take of me some pity and compassion, for I am a poor woman, and a stranger, born out of your dominion. I have here no assured friend and much less indifferent counsel. I flee to you, as to the head of justice within this realm. Alas, Sir, where have I offended you? Or what occasion have you of displeasure, that you intend to put me from you? I take God and all the world to witness that I have been to you a true, humble and obedient wife, ever comfortable to your will and pleasure. I have been always well pleased and contented with all things wherein you had any delight or dalliance. I never grudged a word or countenance, or showed a spark or discontent. I loved all those whom ye loved, only for your sake, whether I had cause or no, and whether they were my friends or enemies. This 20 years or more I have been your true wife and by me ye have had divers children, although it hath pleased God to call them from this world, which hath been no default in me. And when ye had me at first, I take God to my judge; I was a true maid, without touch of man."

"Doctors! You know yourself, without the help of any doctors that your case has no foundation! I care not a straw for your Doctors! For every Doctor and Lawyer that upholds your case I could find a thousand that would find our marriage good and valid!"