Magdalena Quotes

“the drum is joy and the river is joy, which is why so many songs name the Magdalena.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“In Africa, there is no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane, between the material and the spiritual.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“He had nothing modern and yet he lived to a hundred and ten. Why? Because he lived in a world that made sense.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“Our blood that flows through our veins,” a young woman once told me, “is no different from the water that flows through the arteries of life, the rivers of the land.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia

“I need to forget to continue living.’ ”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia

“As warriors, they had destroyed so much, but as men they created little.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“They fish with kites, crafted of plastic and small bits of wood, that rise in the wind and carry their long lines, rigged with perhaps a dozen hooks,”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia

“conscientes de que la creatividad no es la motivación de la acción, es su resultado.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena. Historias de Colombia

“the delicate movements of deer in the evening as the sun softens on the horizon.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“Music was the backdrop of his youth, a cacophony of sound that greeted every dawn and heralded each night”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“love, nature, and desire had fused the worlds of Africa and the Americas into one.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“a powerful resonance that can have the very forest trees overhead swaying in sympathy.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“infusing one’s entire physical being with a sensual promise as innocent and perfect as a prayer.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“Cumbia is a rhythm, a beat, a dance—a choreography of seduction that ignites the spirit and shakes the soul, infusing one’s entire physical being with a sensual promise as innocent and perfect as a prayer. The dance movements of the male recall the desires of the lone cimarrón: passionate, powerful, yearning. Those of the woman, the coy resistance of the native maiden, bright candles in hand, spinning in a whirlwind of indifference. The music builds through the night, an alchemy of spirit and sensation that with every performance enhances its authority and power, laying”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“This was, in part, the genesis of cumbia, the heartbeat of Colombia and its singular gift to the world.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“The drummer is both musician and servant of the divine. Music is entertainment, but also the catalyst of transformation.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“The Spaniards could no more silence the drums than quell the passions of those who danced.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“Americas over three centuries, some four hundred thousand came to Colombia,”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“the Spanish colony turned to Africa. Of the more than ten million men and women dragged in bondage to the Americas over three centuries, some four hundred thousand came to Colombia, nearly twice the number of immigrants that arrived from Spain over those same years.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“of los naturales, as chroniclers described the natives, from 70,000 to a mere 800. In the islands of the Caribbean, some 3 million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“the black robes who, in their evangelical zeal, exhaled pestilence even as they declared smallpox to be the will of God.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“the unleashing upon an entire hemisphere of the concentrated essence of death itself: biological pathogens, virulent, invisible, unknown. As”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“systems of local and long-distance commerce made possible by the Río Magdalena”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“the study of what they left behind: ghostlike memories brought forward in the guise of myths,”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“broken and ravaged by the Spaniards in the last years of the sixteenth century, a once great civilization formally declared dead by a Catholic priest, Antonio Julián, in 1679.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“the arrival of Columbus, more than a thousand would be lost, many within decades of European contact.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“Throughout the Americas, smallpox and measles killed nine out of ten,”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“allowed them to achieve something that has defied us to this day.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“The Zenú as a people survive”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams

“They, too, had little to say about the achievements of their mysterious forefathers. Memories were faint after five centuries.”
― Wade Davis, Magdalena: River of Dreams