Marjorie Agosín Quotes

For me there was happiness in churches, their wax candles giving sermons, their dim lukewarmth, their delicate twilight silence that rustles when the devout make the sign of the cross facing the figure of that barefoot, sweaty man, deathly cold. (first lines of "Wax Candles")

Poetry, which is always with me and brings me to privileged horizons and uncertain but always true pathways

"Yes, I am a refugee. And it is a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. I am an exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love." (p454)

...what is essential to art: They create art despite trauma, no matter how heartbreaking. They constantly question the reality in which their texts were born, but above all, they make more beautiful, through words, the failure and pain of existence.

To write meant to always be awake, willing to take risks, full of magic and happiness, eager to create and undo, because life was that way, like words.

Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices.

In literature I found the caress, the unguarded pleasure, and the voice that had eluded me in this new country. I turned to books with a passion, almost in desperation, because they consoled me. I saw myself criss-crossing the hallways of the library, ransacking in particular the Spanish section and shelves. I discovered the warmth of words, words that belonged to me alone. I paused along their hills, invented the destinies of those exiled like myself. Above all I loved dictionaries, faithful guardians of my language. Through books I crossed borders. Wasn't Latin America an immense shawl united by a free and beautiful language?

"...sometimes memory is dangerous, but on most occasions it can be a salvation. Sometimes remembering means to live a moment in the past again, and in that way survive the present." (p357)

Multiculturalism as an ideology has been a possibility for maybe creating diversity, but I think that it has become a very intolerant concept. And I think it's been really appropriated by people from the left that have very fundamentalist views of the world just like people from the right, and I consider that absolutely dangerous...I like to believe that I'm a person that crosses borders, that I am in the thresholds of places, but I am also rooted in the Spanish world and in the Jewish world. Those are the anchor of my world, those two worlds, and then that's where I speak from. You have to have a platform where you can speak from. It's like you cannot be all over the place, and I think multiculturalism is like being all over the place.

For me, my exile had nothing to do with an expulsion or with the impossibility of remembrance, because somehow or other one always returns. Dictators perish and borders change. However, the desire endures. The desire for a fragrance or for the way in which certain vines cling to doorways. The desire to wake up and recognize oneself in one's own language but more than anything to be recognized by others.

“Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive?” (p184)

I grew up in a secular Jewish home. What was so important for us was the ethical values of Judaism and the central principle of our lives, Tikkun Olam (a Hebrew phrase that means “healing the world”). My father did not believe in organized religion, so we did not belong to a synagogue, but we led a Jewish life filled with traditions and meaning in a more unconventional way. Almost my entire family on my mother’s side came from central Europe, especially Vienna. All of them perished in the Holocaust, with the exception of my great-grandmother and her son. Also my grandfather, because he had arrived to Chile much earlier. For me as a writer, the stories of the Shoah are very important. They are central to my writing, which you can see in Dear Anne Frank and also I Lived on Butterfly Hill, in which one of the principal characters, the grandmother, is a survivor of the Holocaust. I also try to invoke in the readers the universal importance of social justice and tolerance. I believe these are not only Jewish teachings but fundamental human ideals. Yet I feel I was and continue to be shaped by growing up in a Jewish home that emphasized these values.

It is so important to learn how other people live; to become familiar with a language that is not your own; to feel like a stranger. You will have great empathy for and great understanding of the world around you.

To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal.

as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self.