“My mother was French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt and sauce.”
Source: For One More Day
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Mitch Albom 289
American author 1958Related quotes
“I speak in Latin to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.”
Charles V may have said something in this general format, but not with this specific wording. Variants have been quoted for centuries, and the earliest known citation, itself a secondary source dating from 40 years after his death, gives two versions that both differ from the modern one. Girolamo Fabrizi d'Acquapendente's 1601 De Locutione gives:
Unde solebat, ut audio, Carolus V Imperator dicere, Germanorum linguam esse militarem: Hispanorum amatoriam: Italorum oratoriam: Gallorum nobilem ("When Emperor Charles V used to say, as I hear, that the language of the Germans was military; that of the Spaniards pertained to love; that of the Italians to prayer; that of the French was noble").
Alius vero, qui Germanus erat, retulit, eundem Carolum Quintum dicere aliquando solitum esse; Si loqui cum Deo oporteret, se Hispanice locuturum, quod lingua Hispanorum gravitatem maiestatemque prae se ferat; si cum amicis, Italice, quod Italorum dialectus familiaris sit; si cui blandiendum esset, Gallice, quod illorum lingua nihil blandius; si cui minandum aut asperius loquendum, Germanice, quod tota eorum lingua minax, aspera sit ac vehemens (Indeed another, who was German, related that the same Charles V sometimes used to say: if it was necessary to talk with God, that he would talk in Spanish, which language suggests itself for the graveness and majesty of the Spaniards; if with friends, in Italian, for the dialect of the Italians was one of familiarity; if to caress someone, in French, for no language is tenderer than theirs; if to threaten someone or to speak harshly to them, in German, for their entire language is threatening, rough and vehement").
National Prayer Breakfast (2006)
Context: One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.
For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land... and in this country, seeing God's second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash... in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment...
I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.
Even though I was a believer.
Perhaps because I was a believer.
As quoted in "Clemente's Smiling All the Way to the Bank" http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/61275081/ by Milton Richman (UPI), in The San Bernardino County Sun (Tuesday, December 6, 1966), p. 27
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1966</big>
Quoted in Mercure de France, I-XII (1953), trans. Jeannette H. Foster (1977)
“Music is my mother and my father; it is my work and my rest… my blood… my compass… my love…”
“My mother groaned, my father wept,
into the dangerous world I leapt.”
“My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six.”
in his memoir Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned, Random House, 2005, ISBN 1400064090.
"National Brotherhood Week"
That Was the Year That Was (1965)