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

Here in the United States where I have lived since I was a young girl, the solitude of exile makes me feel that so little is mine; that not even the sky has the same constellations. The trees and the faunas do not have the same names or sounds, or the rubbish the same smell. How does one recover the familiar? How does one name the unfamiliar? How can one be another or live in a foreign language? These are the dilemmas of one who writes in Spanish and lives in translation.

Silence is special when you are reflecting inwardly about who you are, but silence as a tool for political behavior—I think that’s always wrong. There are many kinds of silences. (2015)

literature is the only way to preserve memory. I mean, it's like the queen, the king of the preservation of memory. You look at monuments—I just saw the monument of [Robert E.] Lee—you look at the monument of Sadaam Hussein is gone, a lot of historical monuments are going to be vanished according to wars, earthquakes. The only thing that remains are words.