Ilan Stavans Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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This is who I am: a flyspeck of human vanity in a trillion miles of stone-dead interstellar space; a graceless lump of flesh and fear in a remote desert where nearly everything that I can see or touch is designed to hurt me.
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At the end of the day, every decision I make about my music is about creating a collective.
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I'll promise to go easier on drinking and to get to bed earlier, but not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They're too much fun.
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The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.
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I never had teenage years. I guess because I was seen to be more adult than anybody around me.
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I am not the only intense or intellectual cricketer. I played with other cricketers who could be pretty intense and intellectual.
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Writing is only the frosting on my cake. I'm whole without it.
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Breaking the world record in '92 was a very special personal moment, but I'd say my favorite moment as a decathlete was winning the Olympic gold medal. It was a lot of years of work, and when I won it, it was more a sense of relief than jubilation or exaltation.
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I can do whatever I want.
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I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.
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I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.
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Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
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I'd say it's even harder to cater to Hispanics than to the lesbian or gay community. We're so culturally separated: Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Venezuelans. We're all so different.
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To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'
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It's hard to say this about a guy like Eddie Van Halen, one of the greatest guitar players who ever lived, but he's really limited to a style and they're locked into it.
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If one girl with courage is a revolution, imagine what feats we can achieve together.
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The very quick and high sales of the book caught us off guard, but fortunately we got the second edition from the printers at the end of last week and the shops should now be stocked again.
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But when I go to Chicago, I know I'm home.
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At the audition, your assignment is to find something new in the song. Something you've never noticed before. A breath carried over, a thought that ties the whole thing together. Then take the risk and do it.
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My mother never liked Mother's Day. She thought it was a fake holiday dreamed up by Hallmark to commodify deep sentiments that couldn't be expressed with a card.
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I don't write for an audience. I write for myself. And if I imagine an audience at all, it's the characters, but I know that I would keep writing even if no one ever published me again, even if no one ever read me again.
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I love that I came up this way. First of all, I have nine close friends, and it's hard to find people you can trust and lean on in this industry.
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'The New World Haggadah' is meant for American Jews in the 21st century.
