Spanish History Quotes

“Quotes from BEGINNINGS: Where A Life Begins..........

Life did not improve for Maria; it just became slowly less unbearable

Alia’s mother was more than twice her age. Not yet old enough to be expected to die of old age but now no longer a woman with a future; except that which can be lived through her children and theirs.

Her head told her that there was no justice but her heart was unconvinced.

She was relieved that her soul no longer weighed as heavily as it had before, or maybe she had learned how to bear its weight a little more skillfully.

At first she thought it was her son's spirit that spoke to her. But he was gone; and slowly she realized that the voice was coming from within her but was not her own. It was stronger and braver and, perhaps, even crueller, than she could be. It could only be coming from within her womb. It had to be the voice of her unborn child.

"Maybe there is really no justice in the world; just survival and revenge," she said.”
― Gary Heilbronn

“While under the Spanish flag, the Crown rigorously controlled the number of slaves allowed into Cuba and charged the settlers a 20% royalty for each slave they imported. In 1537, Havana was invaded and briefly occupied by the French. On April 6, 1538, Hernando de Soto with about 950 men and horses on ten ships sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain to Santiago de Cuba where he took over as the Governor of Cuba. From Santiago, he sailed around Cuba to Havana with a nine-ship convoy and set up a base which was administered by his wife and used as a stepping-stone to Florida. Anticipating this expedition, he sent Juan de Añasco with two ships to find a suitable landing site along the west coast of Florida. Añasco, who was Hernando de Soto’s scout, returned with four Indians who told fabricated stories about gold in Florida, which De Soto accepted as true. After some months preparing for the expedition, De Soto left Cuba and arrived at Shaw’s Point near present-day Bradenton, Florida, where he started his long trek in search of gold and silver.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, The Exciting Story of Cuba

“While Islamic Spain is held up today as a proto-multiculturalist paradise, in reality non-Muslims there suffered under the discrimination prescribed in Islamic law for dhimmis, non-believers who were subjugated as inferiors and denied equality of rights”
― Pamela Geller, FATWA: Hunted in America

“[Don Carlos] will always remain open-ended, asking to be fleshed out by the imagination of others, silently demanding a finale of his authors, no matter how fantastical.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions

“Such immediate sliding into fiction under the guise of history reveals a remarkable fluidity between history and fiction that, while pertinent to innumerable portrayals of historical personages of other eras and nationalities, seems to acquire a particularly transformational narrative power in the case of Don Carlos.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions

“Thus, "Nenne mich Du" might be the emblematic phrase of this character: the Infante's invitation - in Schiller's words - to both creators and readers/audiences to 'name' him beyond his historical identifier Don Carlos - and all of its variants of Dom Carlos, Don Karlos, Don Carlo. Naming him, in this case, does not mean giving him another name, but calling him into being, endowing him with an identity shaped by an envisioned course of events and actions that lead to an ending. This phrase represents the mystery behind the character and Schiller's disclaimer that what the public is reading or seeing can never be the real Don Karlos - history's Don Carlos remains, largely, an unknown.”
― Maria-Cristina Necula Ph.D., The Don Carlos Enigma: Variations Of Historical Fictions