Cesária Évora

“Evora, Cesaria 1941,updated May 21 2018,https://www.encyclopedia.com/”

“I only regret my success has taken so long to achieve”

“I wasn’t astonished by Europe and I was never that impressed by the speed and grandeur of modern America”

“They’re going to feel my message through my presence and my music”

“Because I couldn’t find anyone to help me out in Cape Verde, I had to start recording in France in 1988”

“There was no real progress,” she acknowledged in Pulse!. “I wasn’t making any money out of it, so I just stopped”

“In Cape Verde ... I used to sing for tourists and for the ships when they would come there”

“I started singing in the neighborhood where I lived, just with my friends... It was just to amuse ourselves”

“Life in the islands is not easy, because there are very few resources, and you could say that my life and life in the islands are related”

“Now I work, and I see the results of my work, so I have some money,” she says. “But I’m still the same person that I was before. I still have the same simple life. I still have the same friends”

“I was born in a poor country. I was poor, but I lived all my life with what I had. I didn’t spend more than I had. Cape Verde is not the only place where there are poor people”

“I’m just a simple person. I’m not hard to understand.”

“Women in Cape Verde are very strong, and we have a fighting spirit.”

“That doesn’t happen to everybody, but it’s common in Cape Verde. That’s why in Cape Verde, women are always fighting for themselves and for their children”

“The fact that I sing about love doesn’t have anything to do with my emotional life. I think I didn’t have a husband because in Cape Verde, when you have a husband, you have a child, two children, three children. Then sometimes if the man wants, he just leaves you and you have to have another man to help you, because you cannot raise those children alone. It’s hard to live like that”

“This was women’s work around the house, but I didn’t like it, so I came out when I was 13”