Quotes

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“Here’s a population who’s a stranger in everybody’s land, and yet the language survives and the culture survives and why should that be? I believe fundamental to the survival is this notion of purity and pollution: you keep to yourselves in order to remain pure, and as soon as you go into the non-Gypsy world you are entering a danger zone.
— Dr. Ian Hancock, professor at the University of Texas at Austin

“The first thing [viewers] will say is, ‘Well, he’s a crook, he’s a thief, he has to talk that way.’ Nobody wants to hear the truth…”
— Grover Marks, like many of his peers, doubts that non-Gypsies will want to know more than the “Gypsy” stereotypes.

“I heard people say: ‘Hitler should have killed you all!’ ‘Why don’t you get out of America and go back where you came from!’ and ‘You steal babies from good white people!'”
— From a letter to the Editor of the Spokesman Review repeating comments overheard at Expo ’74.

“I also acknowledge all of the survivors, Jews and Gypsies. The purpose of this Memorial, of this day, is to tell their story to each generation.”
— Vice President, Al Gore at a 1994 Holocaust Memorial Ceremony

“I remember [Rosa Parks,] the woman that said, ‘I’m tired of sitting at the end of the bus,’ I remember those little things. Jimmy Marks, the crazy Gypsy. I’m tired of hiding out, I’m tired of moving on. My home was built in Spokane, WA, and I wasn’t about to put it on roller skates and roll it down the highway.”
— Jimmy Marks in a phone message to Jasmine Dellal

“This interview is difficult…. This is a first for our people, we’re changing time, we’re changing culture, we’re changing religion, because we need to tell this story to the world.”
— Jimmy Marks

“Uncle Noah said, ‘The way to fulfill our tradition is neither to quarrel nor to explain, as if we were being judged, but to make it sing with meaning.’ “
— Excerpt from The World of The Juki by Douglas Halebi