Quotes About the Spanish Language

Introduction

I (Paul Heller) love collecting the Best Quotes about the Spanish Language for my Fifty Plus Nomad blog. I spend hours searching to find quotes that:

Reflect how I feel about a place or a travel-related issue
Add a new or interesting perspective to a discussion about a place or issue, even if I disagree with the author’s viewpoint.
Make me laugh, cry, or smile.
Perfectly capture a place, emotion, or issue.

I don’t include quotes about unknown places or travel experiences.

All my blog posts lead off with a quote relevant to the post’s subject. I also frequently post quotes on my Facebook group: Long Term Traveling and Living Abroad Over 50.

In addition, I have added several previously unseen quotes I discovered while putting together this page.

I hope you enjoy these quotes as much as I enjoyed putting them together.

Let me know if you have any additional quotes to add to this page.

8 Quotes About the Spanish Language in English

“When I was in Mexico and started to dream in Spanish, I knew that was a good sign that I was learning the language. It was cool.”
Andrea Navedo

I’m learning Cuban. It’s like Spanish, but with fewer words for luxury items.”
Emo Philips

“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.”
Steven Wright

“When did swearing become so easy? You still would never swear in front of your parents or most adults, but when you’re with your friends it’s like every fifth word. Why couldn’t learning Spanish be that easy?“
Charles Benoit

“Urgh, her,’ Suki groaned. “Yeah, she’s still with us. And she’s still a pain in the culo. I’m learning Spanish,’ she said brightly. “Culo means ass.”
Sarah Alderson

“CONJUGATE THIS:
I cut class, you cut class, he, she, it cuts class. We cut class, they cut class. We all cut class. I cannot say this in Spanish because I did not go to Spanish today. Gracias a dios. Hasta luego.”
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“God, Arthur.” He kisses me. “Te quiero. Estoy enamorado. You don’t even know.” And I don’t speak a word of Spanish, but when I look at his face, I get it.”
― Becky Albertalli, What If It’s Us

“Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.”
Junot Díaz

12 Quotes About the Spanish Language Translated from Spanish

“The most difficult problem to solve in practice is language. Spanish-language writers, both here and there, no longer even know the real names of things. Ours is a fabulously effective language, but also a fabulously forgotten one.”
Gabriel García Marquez (translation from Spanish)

“It is impossible to say where the best Spanish is spoken, because there is not one Spanish, but many.”
Gabriel García Marquez (translation from Spanish)

“What does Castilian purity mean? Castilian is an evolved Latin that has adopted Iberian, Visigothic, Arabic, Greek, French, Italian, English and even indigenous American elements. How can we speak of Castilian purity, or at what point can we fix Castilian and claim that any new contribution constitutes a harmful impurity? So-called purity is ultimately a kind of customs protectionism, of linguistic chauvinism, limited, petty and impoverishing, like all chauvinism”.
Ángel Rosenblat, Nuestra lengua en ambos mundos,

“The most expressive Spanish is that of Mexico, which is, at the same time, the most impure. The Mexicans made a mixture of Spanish and pre-Columbian Nahuatl, with the result that they did not completely learn Spanish and did not completely forget Nahuatl.

This is how Mexican was born, which is a more expressive language than the others because in some cases it contains two languages. As Mexicans are very modest, they have created a language that protects the other. It is the language of modesty, in which certain inoffensive expressions hold the key to others that are more lively and direct.”
Gabriel García Marquez (translation from Spanish)

“It cannot be denied that in Latin America there is a strong presence of Spanish culture, along with Portuguese culture in Brazil. It is found in all manifestations of life and Spanish is the language we speak. It is an element of great richness, but at the same time controversial and often despised.

Although this heritage is also part of our cultural personality, there is in Latin America a false shame for everything Spanish that seems to me excessive and dangerous and complicates things for us. On the contrary, I feel very proud to have this contribution and I am not ashamed at all.”
Gabriel García Marquez (translation from Spanish)

“The language -Spanish, Spanish- becomes for us like a liquor that we savor, and which we can no longer do without. We can no longer do without it when we try it, when we search for all its hiding places, all its possibilities, all its purities. We are already, with so much to drink of this liquor, language beodos”.
Azorin

“Spanish is too important to be left in the hands of Spaniards.”
Guillermo Cabrera Infante

“The unity of the Spanish language is in everyone’s interest, with whatever local nuances may be necessary. The whole Spanish-speaking world is a creative laboratory, and the practical thing to do is to accept the most convincing innovations, wherever they come from or transoceanic as one approaches a warm and lively being, not a grammatical product.”
Gabriel Zaid

“If languages had coats of arms like nations or soccer teams, the Spanish language would not have an imperial eagle or a lion rampant, or anything apparently noble: it would have a simple sheep. Shorn.” [referring to the fact that the traffic of people and goods between the kingdoms of Spain around the wool trade contributed from very early on to the need for a common language.”
Juan Ramón Lodares

“Not only are we [Spaniards] not the masters of the language: statistically, we are even a minority. I have learned this by traveling to the Hispanic countries of America, by listening to the Italian musicalities of the Spanish of the Río de la Plata, the classical clarity of the Spanish of Colombia,

but I perceive it above all by listening to the Spanish spoken in New York, where there is a confederation of all possible intonations and accents, and where one realizes, by contrast with the presence of English and of the Saxon civilization, all the common things that language and time have bequeathed us, of the breadth of the imaginary spaces that our language opens up for us.”
Antonio Muñoz Molina

“We Colombians say that we speak the best Spanish in the world, but that is nonsense. The language preserved by the academies is a language of class. There are certain elegant houses in Bogota that try to preserve the purest Castilian of the Golden Age and it turns out that this is wonderful for their visitors, but it does not help them to buy anything in the store.”
Gabriel García Marquez (translation from Spanish)

“Spanish will have the destiny of Latin: to be the mother of languages. I know Latin America very well and I direct a film workshop in Cuba where there is always a student from each Hispanic country of this continent. Well, one of them recently told me that I speak Latin American Esperanto. He was right: as I know all the accents, I am careful to speak in such a way that all my students understand me.”
Gabriel García Marquez (translation from Spanish)
(all quotations in this section are translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator–free version)