Quino taught me to be a child. Quino taught me how to look at the stars, hoping that everything would work out. Quino taught me the desire for justice, social equality, freedom. Quino taught me that the sharpest weapons against the violence of the bullies, the violent, the regimes are sarcasm, candor and irony.
Quino has made me and millions of other children, from many generations, an adult capable of looking at the little ones with boundless love and respect, eager to increase their freedom, their desire to express themselves as they dream most, with all their defects and all their merits.
Quino made me an imaginary citizen of that Buenos Aires, full of contradictions, full of Italians, full of wealth and poverty who lived side by side, in a natural and cruel way, just like in any big city.
Quino taught me to love houses, palaces, their profiles against the infinite sky, the windows from which one can glimpse the lives of others, the loves, the pains, the secrets that do not remain hidden.
Farewell to Quino, Mafalda’s father. The Argentine designer died in Mendoza: or social networks remember him
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Quino taught me that my anxiety, my anguish, my fear could have the right of citizenship in my life, even if I was a child, even if I wanted a positive future. Quino taught me to smile at my most glaring failures.
Quino taught me to love poverty and the creativity that it generates together with imagination and lightness, which turns a sink into a bathtub, a telephone receiver into a cordobes headdress, a studio apartment into a palace.
Quino taught me that you cannot be happy if others are not happy too, but above all that nothing can make you happy like the love of the people around you and that there is no need to be ashamed to tell each other love, to prove it, to be able to reconcile and find oneself also with people who seem to be different from us but to whom we are linked by distant, mysterious and very strong threads.
In 2014, Mafalda’s 50th anniversary celebration in the hometown of its author Quino
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Quino and his smile were the dream of a free and popular Argentina, an image of a South America always on the brink of disaster, always threatened by dictatorship, by the violence of the military, always animated by the social demands that ultimately prevail against the abuse of fascisms.
Quino taught politics, love, art, dreams, hope. All the important things except one: the ability not to mourn him now, writing these lines.
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