Gary Jennings (author)

Gary Jennings (September 20, 1928 – February 13, 1999) was an American author who wrote children's and adult novels. In 1980, after the successful novel Aztec, he specialized in writing adult historical fiction novels.

Quotes

Aztec (1980)

Page-numbers refer to the 1980 Forge edition.

• That we may be better acquainted with our colony of New Spain, of its peculiarities, its riches, the people who possessed it, and the beliefs, rites, and ceremonies which they heretofore held, we wish to be informed of all matters appertaining to the Indians during their existence in that land before the coming of our liberating forces, ambassadors, evangels, and colonizers.
  • Letter from King Charles V to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, p. 3

• Your Most Lofty Majesty's royal cédula specifies that we, in providing the chronicle, shall inform ourself "from ancient Indians." This has necessitated something of a search, inasmuch as the total destruction of this city by Captain-General Hernán Cortés left us very few ancient Indians from whom to seek a credible oral history. Even the workers currently rebuilding the city consist mainly of women, children, the dolts and dotards who were unfit to fight in the sige, brute peasants conscripted form the outlying lands. Oafs, all of them.
  • Letter from Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, p. 5

• Think, imagine, picture yourself, Your Excellency, as that tree of great shade. See in your mind its immensity, its mighty boughs and the birds among them, the lush foliage, the sunlight upon it, the coolness it casts upon a house, a family, the girl and boy who were my sister and myself. Could Your Excellency compress that tree of great shade back into the acorn which Your Excellency's father once thrust between your mother's legs?
  Yya ayya, I have displeased Your Excellency and dismayed your scribes. Forgive me, Your Excellency. I should have guessed that the white men's private copulation with their white women must be different—of more delicacy—than I have seen them perform forcibly upon our women in public. And assuredly the Christian copulation that produced Your Excellency must have been even more

  Yes, yes, Your Excellency, I desist.

  • Dixit:, p. 9

• My life has been long, as ours is measured. I did not die in infancy, as so many of our children do. I did not die in battle or in holy sacrifice, as so many have willingly done. I did not succumb to an excess of drinking, or to the attack of a wild beast, or to the creeping decay of The Being Eaten by the Gods. I did not die by the contracting one of the dread diseases that came with your ships, and of which so many thousands upon thousands have perished. I have outlived even the gods, who forever had been deathless and who forever would be immortal. I have survived for more than a full sheaf of years, to see and do and learn and remember much. But no man can know everything of even his own time, and this land's life began immeasurably long ages before my own. It is only of my own that I can speak, only my own that I can bring back to shadow life of your rusty black ink....
  • Dixit:, p. 10

• I have heard you Christians complain of our "multitudes" of gods and goddesses, who held dominion over every facet of nature and of human behavior. I have heard you complain that you never can sort out and understand the workings of our crowded pantheon. However, I have counted and compared. I do not believe that we relied on so many major and minor deities as you do—the Lord God, the Son Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary—plus all those other Higher Beings you call Angels and Apostles and Saints, each of them the governing patron of some single facet of your world, your lives, your tónaltin, even every single day in the calendar. In truth, I believe we recognized fewer deities, but we charged each of ours with more diverse functions.
  • Alter Pars, p. 28

• The building themselves, from the distance, were dark and indistinct of contour, but the lights, ayyo, the lights! Yellow, white, red, jacinth, all the various colors of flame—here and there a green or blue one, where some temple's altar fire had been sprinkled with salt or copper filings. And every one of those shining beads and clusters and bands of light shone twice, each having its brilliant reflection in the lake. Even the stone causeways that vault from the island to the mainland, even those wore lanterns on posts at intervals along their reach across the water. From our acáli, I could see only the two causeways jeweled chain across the throat of night, with the city displayed between them, a splendid bright-jeweled pendant on the night's bosom.
  "Tenochtítlan, Cem-Anáhuac Tlali Yolóco," murmured my father. "It is truly The Heart and Center of the One World." I had been so transfixed with enchantment that I had not noticed him join me at the forward edge of our freighter. "Look long, son Mixtli. You may experience this wonder and many other wonders more than once. But, of first times, there is always and forever only one."
  • Alter Pars, p. 38

• "No man ever took better care of his life. He lived only to go on living."
  I waited for more, but he said no more, so I asked, "What became of him, Master Cuachic?"
  "He died."
  "That is all?"
  "What else ever becomes of any man? I no longer remember even his name. No one remembers anything at all about him, except that he lived and then he died."
  • Tertia Pars, p. 70

• "Surely my life awaits, whichever way I go from here, and whether I go alone or not."
  The cacao man smiled too, but ironically. "Yes, at your age, many possible lives await. Go whichever way you choose. Go alone or in company. The companions may walk with you a long way or a little. But at the end of your life, no matter how crowded were its roads and its days, you will have learned what all must learn. And that will be too late for any starting over, too late for anything but regret. So learn it now. No man has ever yet lived out any life but one, and that one his chosen own, and most of that alone."
  • Tertia Pars, p. 97

• Your Astute Majesty can hardly have failed to notice that the earlier pages have treated—casually, without remorse or repentance—of such sins as homicide, prolicide, suicide, anthropophagy, incest, harlotry, torture, idolatry, and breach of the Commandment to honor father and mother. If, as it has been said, one's sins are wounds of one's soul, this Indian's soul is bleeding at every pore.
  • Letter from Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, p. 98–99

• To command respect and deference and privileges reserved for the nobility, I need only dare to be a noble.
  • Quarta Pars, p. 106

• You tell me then that I must perish
  like the flowers that I cherish.
  Nothing remaining of my name,
  nothing remembered of my fame?
  But the gardens I planted still are young—
  the songs I sang will still be sung!
  • Quarta Pars, p. 113, also the novel's epigraph, attributed to "Huéxotzin, Prince of Texcóco, ca. 1484"
  • Adapted from original Nahuatl poetry:
    • Zan ca iuhquin o yaz in ōmpopoliuh xochitla, antlenotleyoyez in quemmanian, antlenitacihcayez in tlalticpac. Manel xochitl manel cuicatl…
    • "Even as I shall go forth into the place of decayed flowers, so sometime will it be with your fame and deeds on earth. Although they are flowers, although they are songs…"

• Your Most Lofty Majesty has earlier bidden your chaplain to secure "writings, tablets, or other records" to substantiate the tales told in these pages. But we assure you, Sire, that the Aztec exaggerates wildly when he speaks of writing and reading, drawing and painting. These savages never created or possessed or preserved any mementos of their history aside from some plicate paper folders, skins and panels bearing multitudes of primitive figures such as children might scribble.
  • Letter from Bishop Juan de Zumárraga, p. 165

• The gods supposedly know all our plans, and know their ends before their beginnings. The Gods are mischievous, and they delight to potter with the plans of men. They usually prefer to complicate those plans, as they might snarl a fowler's net, or to frustrate them so the plans come to no result whatever. Very seldom do the gods intervene to any worthier purpose. But I do believe, that time, they looked at my plan and said among themselves, "This dark scheme contrived by Dark Cloud, it is so ironically good, let us make it ironically even better."
  • Quinta Pars, p. 172