My activism in human rights was born from various conditions that came together: I was Jewish, female, and an exile. - Marjorie Agosín

Home is understanding and being understood.

These narrators show that written history contains the lyricism of poetry and the rational insanity of passion. They teach us that History and these smaller histories spring from an intimate, delicate conscience where memory attempts not only to preserve the great events of History such as wars, conquests, and triumphs, but also in the daily history that is created in a park, in the depths of the ocean, or in the ancient icon of the family.

you can be a Jew so rooted in your history and in your values that in a way God becomes secondary. And I think that's an amazing thing that Jews have been able to say. But what has linked my Judaism to my experience as a writer are two fundamental things. I think that Judaism has always understood the world from an ethical point of view, and I'm not talking about contemporary Israel or politics, but I'm talking about the Ten Commandments and the necessity, this old Talmudic concept where the title of the book comes from, "to mend to world": to create justice, if you save one life you save the world, is basically saying if you are a decent human being, you are really doing decent things in the world. So the ethics of Judaism and the struggles for social justice have been what I have wanted to take from that Judaism.