Home is understanding and being understood. - Marjorie Agosín

I've always struggled to retain what I have lost, and I've tried to retain it through writing, but then I realize that not even writing can hold to this tremendous loss, and that's why it's so fragmented.

Throughout history, women have always been close to language. Transmitters of legends, healers, magicians and fortune tellers, women possess a tapestry of stories that are slowly beginning to be transcribed. Curiously, with the advent of authoritarian governments in Latin America, women have left the private spaces of house, church, and marketplace to begin to poeticize their experiences through the written word that had previously been denied to them. We must not forget that even with the Cuban Revolution and the political effervescence that followed in the 1960s, the arts in Latin America continued to be dominated by men. Women were only allowed to participate through their relationships with men: the "companero," the boss, and the patriarch.

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.