...what is essential to art: They create art despite trauma, no matter how heartbreaking. They constantly question the reality in which their texts w… - Marjorie Agosín

"I am not worried about earthquakes that come from the ground as much as those that are born in the soul...When the earth trembles and you don't have anything to hold on to, you can't steady yourself. It seems like even your house, which you thought was so safe, is nothing but a flimsy raft being knocked about by waves...Our souls can crumble when we don't care about our neighbors, or when we say hateful things about others, or exclude people for being different. But remember, Celeste, that there are always so many more ways to heal and help a soul than to break one. Human beings are just like the earth. We want to be whole. Remember that. Promise?" (p44-5)

I felt that to lose my language was to lose my soul, my being, and again, it's the image of being in a void. I think to be displaced is like in a void almost like, to think of T.S. Eliot, like hollowness, a world of hollowness...I feel that language evokes emotion, intimacy, affection. And the emotions I evoke in the Spanish language in my writing or even in my own life with other people are not the same ones as in the English language.

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.