To write meant to always be awake, willing to take risks, full of magic and happiness, eager to create and undo, because life was that way, like word… - Marjorie Agosín

...what is essential to art: They create art despite trauma, no matter how heartbreaking. They constantly question the reality in which their texts were born, but above all, they make more beautiful, through words, the failure and pain of existence.

I think food is the closest thing we have to memory—to the memory of family gatherings, the memory of your grandmother the cook, or maybe the desire for a certain food you never had. But food is really about memory: the memory of taste, the memory of when you ate the meal. I think a lot of people who left their homelands, a lot of exiles or people who were deprived of food in concentration camps, they always tie food to memory—to memory of who they were.

"Yes, I am a refugee. And it is a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. I am an exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love." (p454)