Best 67 quotes in «argentina quotes» category

The entire affective world, constructed over the years with utmost difficulty, collapses with a kick in the father's genitals, a smack on the mother's face, an obscene insult to the sister, or the sexual violation of a daughter. Suddenly an entire culture based on familial love, devotion, the capacity for mutual sacrifice collapses. Nothing is possible in such a universe, and that is precisely what the torturers know… From my cell, I'd hear the whispered voices of children trying to learn what was happening to their parents, and I'd witness the efforts of daughters to win over a guard, to arouse a feeling of tenderness in him, to incite the hope of some lovely future relationship between them in order to learn what was happening to her mother, to get an orange sent to her, to get permission for her to go to the bathroom.

The problem with the 11:11 Phenomenon is getting anybody interested in it that hasn't experienced it themselves. Other phenomena, such as U.F.Os or crop circles, are able to be seen. We can debate them. But seeing and being guided by 11:11 is hard to convey to those uninitiated in its ways.

The new politicians resembled hyenas and foxes. In both hemispheres, the people quickly forgot. Compassion and rage shared the fate of autumn flowers, upon which settles hoarfrost: they had faded, withered, then died under the weight of rent, prices, inflation, soap operas and talk shows, family life, victories and defeats in stadiums.

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.

Una mirada desde la alcantarilla puede ser una visión del mundo, la rebelión consiste en mirar una rosa hasta pulverizarse los ojos.

Were the “pampas,” perhaps, flatter than the land they were crossing? He doubted it; what could be flatter than a horizontal plane?

Argentina and Brasil are both extremely good south american teams who'll play a central role at the worldcup.

You come to me, you appear to me in the night, the fact that you're not here appears to me, that I can't tell you this even though I pretend like I can, not being able to ever tell you is still something I can't understand. That you could have taken so long to decompose, too, that, too, I can't believe there's still so much left of you, down there, buried, hair and things like that, skin. I don't want to take anything, I never wanted to, and I would give (I don't know what, not everything because you wouldn't be there, but I'd give a lot) so much to be able to tell you, for real, to see you, to sing a song with you, shout it out hugging each other, have you over to my apartment, for you to get to know my house and my boyfriend, the one I have now, and have him get to know you and have you tell me which one's better, which one you like better, if it's Juli, if it's him, even though obviously you would like Manuel better, and in reality you wouldn't care about either of them, because the two of us is enough, there's nothing else, we never needed anything else, although we did.

Argentina is a marvelous place. Argentines are great bankers of information. They import information; if someone sneezes in Milan or in New York, they clean their faces very fast there.

Argentina has the best bird shooting in the world.

When you're a kid, the world can be bounded in a nutshell. In geographical terms, a child's universe is a space that comprises home, school and—possibly—the neighbourhood where your cousins or your grandparents live. In my case, the universe sat comfortably within a small area of Flores that ran from the junction of Boyacá and Avellaneda (my house), to the Plaza Flores (my school). My only forays beyond the area were when we went on holiday (to Córdoba or Bariloche or to the beach) or occasional, increasingly rare visits to my grandparents' farm in Dorrego, in the province of Buenos Aires. We get our fist glimpse of the big wide world from those we love unconditionally. If we see our elders suffer because they cannot get a job, or see them demoted, or working for a pittance, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the world outside is cruel and brutal. (This is politics.) If we hear our parents bad-mouthing certain politicians and agreeing with their opponents, our compassion translates these observations and we conclude that the former are bad guys and the latter are good guys. (This is politics.) If we observe palpable fear in our parents at the very sight of soldiers and policemen, our compassion translates our observations and we conclude that, though all children have bogeymen, ours wear uniforms. (This is politics.)

Y esto me hace pensar en la necesidad de inventar previamente algún sistema que permita detectar la canallería en personajes respetables y medirla con exactitud para descontarle a cada individuo la cantidad que merece que se le descuente. Una especie de canallómetro que indique con una aguja la cantidad de mierda producida por el señor X en su vida hasta este Juicio Final, la cantidad a deducir en concepto de sinceridad o de buena disposición, y la cantidad neta que debe tragar, una vez hechas las cuentas.

Argentina is my country, my family, my way of expressing myself. I would trade all of my records for the World Cup trophy.

Argentina won't be at Euro 2000 because they're from South America.

At the Argentina game, how would you have guessed that Darren Anderton would have gone off with cramp?

And now with Argentina out, they will be on the plane home with France

If I have to apply five turns to the screw each day for the happiness of Argentina, I will do it.

I am encouraged to see women are being elected in Chile, Argentina, Liberia, Ireland. More is more.

If you're a Kennedy and you go to Italy or you go to Argentina, you're treated as royalty. And in the United States, we're endlessly fascinated by the family.

If I could apologise and go back and change history I would do. But the goal is still a goal, Argentina became world champions and I was the best player in the world

I'm very comfortable in Argentina. I was raised there as a baby and stayed there until I was 11 years old, so the first decade of my life or my formative years were spent in Argentina. I stayed in tune with the food, music and language.

In Argentina at various tournaments, it's great. Every day it's full, everybody's crazy about tennis, everybody wants to play tennis.

I repeat what I always say: I want the best for Argentina in every way. I never try to make trouble for anybody.

I was, I am and I always will be a drug addict. A person who gets involved in drugs has to fight it everyday.

I'm dealing with Mexico, I'm dealing with Argentina. We were dealing in this case with Mike Flynn. All this information gets put into The Washington Post and The New York Times, and I'm saying, what's going to happen when I'm dealing on the Middle East? We've got to stop it. That's why it's a criminal penalty.

One of the big problems in America's economic polarization and shrinkage is that pensions can't be paid. So there are going to be defaults on pensions here, just like Europeans are insisting in rolling back pensions. You can look at Greece and Argentina as the future of America.

My uncle is from Argentina, so I grew up hearing Spanish. My Spanish isn't very good, but my pronunciation isn't terrible.

One thing I like about Argentina, they only cook with salt; that's it.

People always ask me, when I had the idea for TOMS, did it change my life? As romantic and noble as it is, no it did not change my life. But when I went to Argentina on that first shoe-drop, it did change my life.

Just short of my 40th birthday, I told my wife, Beth, I was going to build us a little weekend place in...well, in the uh, Southern Hemisphere. The deep Southern Hemisphere, actually. New Zealand, maybe. Or Argentina. Possibly Chile. She suggested medication.

My favorite scene that I ever filmed was singing "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" from the balcony of the Casa Rosada in Argentina [where the real Eva Peron once stood] during Evita. That was amazing. SO real and surreal. Bizarre.

When I first came out of Argentina to Europe, the flight took 36 hours. Now it takes 12 hours, and the world is still shrinking.

The pope [Francis] takes his vocabulary from his pastoral experience, not from the rhetorical tool kit of liberation theology, with its Marxist yammering about "center" and "periphery." The "peripheries," for Francis, are all those who have fallen through the cracks of late-modernity and post-modernity - in his native Argentina, because of colossal corruption, political and financial.

The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.

A ferramenta das vanguardas, sempre conforme minha visão pessoal, é o procedimento. (...) Construtivismo, escritura automática, ready-made, dodecafonismo, cut-up, acaso, indeterminação. Os grandes artistas do século XX não são os que fizeram obra, mas aqueles que inventaram procedimentos para que a obra se fizesse sozinha, ou não se fizesse.

Stoichkov is a great person and an exceptional player... Only if we had him at Napoli... can you imagine the Stoichkov-Maradona attacking duo?

Em 1923, vivendo em Berlim, Kafka costumava ir a um parque, o Steglitz, que ainda existe. Certo dia encontrou uma menina chorando, tinha perdido sua boneca. Kafka naquele instante inventou uma história: a boneca não estava perdida, apenas tinha saído de viagem para conhecer o mundo. Tinha escrito uma casa, que ele possuía em casa e lhe traria no dia seguinte. E assim foi: dedicou aquela noite a escrever a carta, com toda a sinceridade. (...) No dia seguinte, a menina esperava-o no parque, e a ‘correspondência’ prosseguiu à razão de uma carta por dia, durante três semanas. A boneca nunca esquecia de enviar o seu amor à menina, de quem lembrava e a quem abandonava. Suas aventuras no estrangeiro a mantinham longe, e com a aceleração própria do mundo da fantasia, tais aventuras acabaram em noivado, compromisso, casamento e filhos, de modo que a volta era adiada indefinidamente. Isso para que então a menina, leitora fascinada desse romance epistolar, se conformasse com a perda, a que por fim acabou vendo como ganância. Privilegiada menina berlinense, única leitora do livro mais belo de Kafka. (...) Tendemos a sorrir diante do choro das crianças, seus dramas nos parecem menores e fáceis de solucionar. Mas para elas não são. Fazer o esforço de entrar nas relatividades de seu mundo equivale ao trabalho de entrar no mundo de um artista, onde tudo é signo. O contrato de uma menina com sua boneca é um contrato semiótico, uma criação de sentido, sustentada pela tensão verossímil com a fantasia. (...) para o escritor não se trata apenas de observar, é preciso descobrir os signos ocultos naquilo que se observa.

At a lunchtime reception for the diplomatic corps in Washington, given the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, I was approached by a good-looking man who extended his hand. 'We once met many years ago,' he said. 'And you knew and befriended my father.' My mind emptied, as so often happens on such occasions. I had to inform him that he had the advantage of me. 'My name is Hector Timerman. I am the ambassador of Argentina.' In my above album of things that seem to make life pointful and worthwhile, and that even occasionally suggest, in Dr. King’s phrase as often cited by President Obama, that there could be a long arc in the moral universe that slowly, eventually bends toward justice, this would constitute an exceptional entry. It was also something more than a nudge to my memory. There was a time when the name of Jacobo Timerman, the kidnapped and tortured editor of the newspaper La Opinion in Buenos Aires, was a talismanic one. The mere mention of it was enough to elicit moans of obscene pleasure from every fascist south of the Rio Grande: finally in Argentina there was a strict ‘New Order’ that would stamp hard upon the international Communist-Jewish collusion. A little later, the mention of Timerman’s case was enough to derail the nomination of Ronald Reagan’s first nominee as undersecretary for human rights; a man who didn’t seem to have grasped the point that neo-Nazism was a problem for American values. And Timerman’s memoir, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, was the book above all that clothed in living, hurting flesh the necessarily abstract idea of the desaparecido: the disappeared one or, to invest it with the more sinister and grisly past participle with which it came into the world, the one who has been ‘disappeared.’ In the nuances of that past participle, many, many people vanished into a void that is still unimaginable. It became one of the keywords, along with escuadrone de la muerte or ‘death squads,’ of another arc, this time of radical evil, that spanned a whole subcontinent. Do you know why General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina was eventually sentenced? Well, do you? Because he sold the children of the tortured rape victims who were held in his private prison. I could italicize every second word in that last sentence without making it any more heart-stopping. And this subhuman character was boasted of, as a personal friend and genial host, even after he had been removed from the office he had defiled, by none other than Henry Kissinger. So there was an almost hygienic effect in meeting, in a new Washington, as an envoy of an elected government, the son of the brave man who had both survived and exposed the Videla tyranny.

É com os escritores imaginários que eu aprendo o que quero fazer. Por exemplo, Stephen Dedalus ou Nick Adams. Leio suas vidas como um modo de entender do que se trata. Não tenho interesse em me inspirar nos escritores "reais". O desprezo de Dedalus pela família, pela religião e pela pátria será o meu. Silêncio, exílio e astúcia.

...el Día Uno es todo el primer momento de tu vida en el cual estás atravesado por las instituciones y aprendés, en el mejor de los casos, a desconfiar de ellas, mientras dejás que tejan hilos firmes, en tu cráneo, con la intención de no dejar espacios vacíos: los agujeros del sistema [...] El Día Dos empieza y su amanecer es plateado, con una nueva y no menos firme institución que son las sustancias, legales o ilegales, y algún tipo de pretensión, o nada. En los dos casos, todos los días son el mismo.

El nombre de una mujer me delata. Me duele una mujer en todo el cuerpo.

For all its outwardly easy Latin charm, Buenos Aires was making me feel sick and upset, so I did take that trip to the great plains where the gaucho epics had been written, and I did manage to eat a couple of the famous asados: the Argentine barbecue fiesta (once summarized by Martin Amis's John Self as 'a sort of triple mixed grill swaddled in steaks') with its slavish propitiation of the sizzling gods of cholesterol. Yet even this was spoiled for me: my hosts did their own slaughtering and the smell of drying blood from the abattoir became too much for some reason (I actually went 'off' steak for a good few years after this trip). Then from the intrepid Robert Cox of the Buenos Aires Herald I learned another jaunty fascist colloquialism: before the South Atlantic dumping method was adopted, the secret cremation of maimed and tortured bodies at the Navy School had been called an asado. In my youth I was quite often accused, and perhaps not unfairly, of being too politicized and of trying to import politics into all discussions. I would reply that it wasn’t my fault if politics kept on invading the private sphere and, in the case of Argentina at any rate, I think I was right. The miasma of the dictatorship pervaded absolutely everything, not excluding the aperitifs and the main course.

Heredé de mis antepasados las ansias de huir. Dicen que mi sangre es europea. Yo siento que cada glóbulo procede de un punto distinto. De cada nación, de cada provincia, de cada isla, golfo, accidente, archipiélago, oasis. De cada trozo de tierra o de mar han usurpado algo y así me formaron, condenándome a la eterna búsqueda de un lugar de origen. Con los labios expresamente dibujados para exhalar quejas. Con la frente estrujada por todas las dudas. Con la malicia instintiva de la prohibición. Heredé el paso vacilante con objeto de no estatizarme nunca con firmeza en lugar alguno. ¡En todo y en nada! ¡En nada y en todo!

He wrote very well in those days, as it happens, much better than he does now. He had absolute convictions, and style is nothing more than the absolute conviction of possessing a style.

I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)

Mudanças, novos bairros onde circulo como um estrangeiro, renovando meu interesse pela cidade. Já faz algum tempo, Barracas, os velhos prédios da fábrica – por exemplo, a da Bagley –, tão abundante por aqui, junto com os armazéns próximos do porto velho, que dão nome ao bairro. Também fica perto o parque Lezama, que tem uma atmosfera serena, com alguns velhos bares e restaurantezinhos muito agradáveis. Sempre faço a experiência de ficar sem dinheiro e conhecer a cidade a pé, procurando locais baratos, viajando de ônibus, uma experiência mais direta, mais conflituosa, não mediada pela qualidade mágica do dinheiro que alivia todo desconhecimento da realidade, porque quando tudo pode ser comprado não há enigmas.

Narrar es jugar al póquer con un rival que puede mirarte las cartas.

Ni la conquista de Tenochtitlán, ni las desigualdades de género ni la indigencia pueden explicarse sin comprender algo acerca de la capacidad de ciertas minorías o sectores para naturalizar ideas en una sociedad determinada. Desarmar esos mitos es condición necesaria para potenciar cambios sociales y culturales.

Now they're really amused, and burst into laughter. Someone tries a variation while still clapping hands: 'Clipped prick… clipped prick.' Whereupon they begin alternating while clapping their hands: 'Jew… Clipped prick… Jew… Clipped prick.' It seems they're no longer angry, merely having a good time. I keep bouncing in the chair and moaning as the electric shocks penetrate [....]

Obviamente me siento mucho más cerca de John Berger o de Calvino que de García Márquez.