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Quote by Cheri Honkala

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Cheri Honkala

Cheri Honkala, born in 1963, is an American actor known for her performances in theater and film. She is particularly renowned for her roles in independent films and theater pieces. more

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“In Brazil, even inside the same city, people from different parts dress differently. Sao Paulo, for example, is more connected to global trends and urban movements. Rio de Janeiro is more influenced by the beach, and has a sort of Cali vibe with the way people dress. Porto Alegre down in the south has a hard winter, so people have to dress to face the cold days.”

“Personally I don't like labels: Brazil is huge and each part has its own specifics. Of course the climate influences how people dress, but even climate can be completely different in different parts of the country here. Like any other part of the world, jeans, T-shirt and sneakers are the uniform for kids in the big cities. As the streetwear scene evolves, people get more connected to global brands, thanks to Internet.”

“Brasil used to have - and still has, in some ways - a strong culture of showing off. And that's not only in sneakers and streetwear. People like to show how much their sneakers cost, usually by rocking performance models with visible technology, like Nike Shox, adidas Springblade and ASICS Noosa. It's like a status symbol for someone that wants to show to the world they "succeeded in life," no matter how rich they actually are.”

“One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia" - the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn't mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of the novel as a space that can bring all these languages together - not just aggregate them, like the Internet is so good at doing, but bring them into a dialogue.”

“Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation - like they say, the past is a foreign country - but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.”

“If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or memoir. If you don't want to make that claim - if that's not what's important to you; if you're more interested in storytelling and interiority and interpersonal relationships than in objective, checkable facts about the world - then why wouldn't you call it a novel, and take advantage of what that gets you, of the extra freedom, of belonging to the tradition of the novel?”

“I don't think anything can substitute long talks, and long talks are somehow never as easy to schedule again as they were in school, when most people - at least in my little socioeconomic corner of the world - live not with their families or sexual partners, but with same-sex friends. I really miss that from college. I never really thought at the time about how things would never be that way again.”