Quotes About Spanish

Cervantes is the most important Spanish writer. But he is not the most representative of the Spanish. His irony, his sense of humor - they are too subtle to seem Spanish.

I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.

We were doing the same thing. We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility.

Kerry was here in Los Angeles. He was courting the Spanish vote by speaking Spanish. And he showed people he could be boring in two languages.

My Spanish is getting a little bit loose. Sometimes I go to Spain and after I've been talking with my folks for a while... you start changing the verb for the adjective, for example, which is a common thing between Spanish and English. I change that sometimes but after a couple days there, boom, I'm back.

I bought a self learning record to learn Spanish. I turned it on and went to sleep; the record got stuck. The next day I could only stutter in Spanish.

It's just starting. I think it's going to take another year and a half to get up to critical mass, but everybody loves Chinese food, Thai food, Japanese food, and it's all been exploited. The Filipinos combined the best of all of that with Spanish technique. The Spanish were a colonial power there for 500 years, and they left behind adobo and cooking in vinegar - techniques that, applied to those tropical Asian ingredients, are miraculous.

From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish.

President Bush said that American workers will need new skills to get the new jobs in the 21st century. Some of the skills they're going to need are Spanish, Chinese, Korean, because that's where the jobs went. Who better than Bush as an example of what can happen when you take a job without any training.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled - Manteca, Madera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon field; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I stuck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragant air. It was the most beautiful of all moments.

I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.

My name means 'hope' in Spanish and it's a name I want to live up to.

We changed it to emocionó, the way you say in Spanish, "to emotion me" [to be moved]. That, as opposed to "haunt." We wanted the feeling of sadness and grief and obsession, so we used emocionó.

When I sang my American folk melodies in Budapest, Prague, Tiflis, Moscow, Oslo, or the Hebrides or on the Spanish front, the people understood and wept or rejoiced with the spirit of the songs. I found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mine, they understand each other in the common language of work, suffering, and protest.

I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.

Stock prices have been quoted in fractions for two centuries, based on a system descended from Spanish pieces of eight. Each dollar was cut into eight bits worth 12.5 cents each.

One of the first things that my English teacher told when I began studying in New York was, "You're here because if you pick it up from the street, not everyone speaks good English." And it happens all the time, anywhere. If you pick up Spanish from the streets, you're not going to be able to speak it correctly.

William R. Polk discusses the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon [ Bonaparte] and other cases where the conflict turns into a political war, and the invader, who usually has overwhelming power, loses because they can't fight the political war.

We’re days away from going full scale against Malone, and in the meantime, we’re under fire from above. And I’m about as useful as a three-legged dog.” “You’re much more useful than any kind of dog, mi vida.” Marc purred and pressed me into the counter, his hands on my hips. I couldn’t resist a smile. I was a real sucker for Spanish.

I have a rescue dog named Fideo, which means 'noodle' in Spanish, and a cat named Hutch.

I've always loved to sing in Spanish. To me, it's just my culture. It's what I am; I'm Latina.

Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers.

I am fluent in Spanish and I understand French, Italian and Portuguese.

I'd say that Spanish football is probably the best I've seen.

Always when I write my music, I take my guitar, and I improvise always with a melody, you know, lyrics in Spanish. But sometimes I use some words in English. I don't know why. Maybe because I listen to a lot of music in English.

I'm not a salsa singer who wants to sing in English, and I'm not this American kid who wants to sing Spanish.

[Doing a bilingual album] helped artistically because whenever I got bored of writing in English, I would write in Spanish. It's always cool when you have the choice.

It was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.

I’ve never enjoyed myself more than I have the past forty-eight hours, during which I’ve been trapped in a car with one of the worst drivers I’ve ever seen, run up the Spanish Steps and then down again so I could be on time to wait in line to perjuer myself at the American consulate. And I’d like to continue doing those sorts of thing with you on a regular basis for the foreseeable future.

I remember when the O.J. verdict was read; at my high school, all of the teachers were like, "We are stopping class right now," and turned it on and we watched it. There were people coming out of their classrooms, like, "Yeah!" Some people were like, "Nooo." I was in Spanish class.

The communists basically acted as the police force of the security system of the [Spain] Republic and were very much opposed to the anarchists, partially because [Joseph] Stalin still hoped at that time to have some kind of pact with Western countries against [Adolf] Hitler. That, of course, failed and Stalin withdrew the support to the Republic. They even withdrew the Spanish gold reserves.

And there are Ben [Jonson] and William Shakespeare in wit-combat, sure enough; Ben bearing down like a mighty Spanish war-ship, fraught with all learning and artillery; Shakespeare whisking away from him - whisking right through him, athwart the big bulk and timbers of him; like a miraculous Celestial Light-ship, woven all of sheet-lightning and sunbeams!

He sucked his lips in an attempt not to laugh. "Aren't you Spanish?" She raised one arm in a salute. "Viva la Queen Isabella!" "I see. Then why are you speaking with a French accent?

I want to sing more in Spanish. I want to sing the songs of Granados; the songs of Montsalvatge. To do things that truly I've not done before.

Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I'd listen to Italian music.

I had the right amount of detachment to go back and really appreciate what I had grown up with. There’s a particular style that is very Peru that you don’t see anywhere else; it’s got so many different imprints. When you mix Incan minimalism with the heavy, ornate Spanish Baroque, it is very interesting.

The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn't really get the hang of it. I was only 13, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried, but got nowhere with it.

Jacián!" She yells again, and then she says something in Spanish. A moment later he comes down the hallway. "I'm going to tell Grandfather you said that," he says. "What do you want?

In California, I guess you belong to the state; you don't even belong to your parents. It's an old Spanish law. It doesn't require your parents to swear out a complaint; anybody can.

We with Michael Jackson were in the studio recording some work on "Man in the Mirror" or the duet. I can't remember which it was. We did the duet in three languages: English, French and Spanish. So, I spent like a week with him in the studio doing the three songs in different languages. It was just an awesome experience recording with him.

Now the ordinary Protestant, Jew or Secularist has a stereotype about Catholicism. It consists of Spanish Catholicism, Latin-American Catholicism and, let us say, a Catholicism of O'Connor's "Great Hurrah." Now there are types of Catholicism like that but this doesn't - this doesn't do justice to the genuine relation that Catholicism has had to Democratic Society.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

First my mother was Spanish. Then she became a Jehovahs Witness.

I'm a daughter of the middle class with a strong sense of social mobility and individualism, like the waves of immigrants, like my Spanish grandparents, who made Argentina.

Afro-Caribbean influences are in me as a creative being the same way Spanish influences were in Picasso's work. I think the notion of labels - "black dancer, black choreographer" -is a ploy to divide and conquer, and to limit.