Magic is another way of looking at the world. Magic cultivates the art of intuition and appreciation for the unexpected. Magic interprets the world t… - Marjorie Agosín

when 9/11 was taking place in the U.S., few journalists, except people like Ariel Dorfman, few of them mentioned that there was another 9/11 that took place in Chile created by the terrorism that the United States government, in a way, was supporting through the CIA...this country is having very similar patterns of dictatorial regimes, and I feel somehow I am like in a little dictatorship here under disguise of this democracy. And George Bush is creating, has created, the ideology of fear, and saying, "If you do not vote for me, you will not be protected." And I think there is paranoia, the levels of alert, and that's exactly what General Pinochet did...The Patriot Act is just a disgrace to American faith in the world, and I am very frightened for this country. I have been through a dictatorship, and I think we've all complied to so many things, and what is really scaring me is this whole defeatist attitude that there's nothing that can be done, and I think that's wrong. There's much that can be done.

Quite close together, in the warmness of shared bodies, they dared to dream of the sea. Some imagined it as the deep well of the soul; others sketched it out like the face of a drowned man, weighed down with broken seaweed and shells. (first lines of "First Time to the Sea")

It seems that...literature grants us the ability to endure and encompass traumatic and horrifying events, to articulate them through writing and the evocative power of memory...It is a way of articulating the self, as well as the soul. A world without writers would be a world lingering in the shadows of silence...Literature moves us, rescues us from oblivion, and makes us witnesses to our history..literature binds the voices from the most diverse geographies, makes the experiences of women universal, and gives hope to future generations.