Quotes from Ariel Dorfman

A mi padre le pasó lo peor que le puede pasar a un hombre: enamorarse de su dolor. (...) Porque empieza a no haber lugar en el corazón para el dolor de nadie más. El primer recuerdo que tengo en la memoria es de mi padre hablándome. Hablándome de cosas que yo no entendía: mi madre; de lo lejos que estaba la utopía que él había soñado de joven; de la crueldad creciente del mundo. Con sólo escucharlo ya le aliviaba su congoja.

In order to attain knowledge, which is a form of power, we cannot continue to endorse, with blinded vision and stilted jargon, the initiation rituals with which our spiritual high priests seek to legitimize and protect their exclusive privileges of thought and expression.

We do not want to be like the scientist who takes his umbrella with him to go study the rain.

Ask any child from Chile to sketch something, anything at all. Before any human figure, a cloud, a tree, they'll fill the upper space with an array of jagged peaks.

El desierto no ofrece siquiera la ilusión de que uno podrá ser alguna vez otra cosa que un intruso.

El desierto] Es como una mujer [...] Seduce, atrae... Cuando lo ves por la primera vez, el desierto ofrece muchas tentaciones y luego te las va negando lentamente, repite la misma oferta, cada día te da otra vez más, casi con desperación, lo que ya te ha dado ayer. Siempre igual en su monotonía. Y uno empieza a darse cuenta de que realmente jamás se entregará

Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!

In Disney, the working class has therefore been split into two groups: criminals in the city, and noble savages in the countryside.

This America has been the country of greed rather than the country of need.

I think to be in exile is a curse, and you need to turn it into a blessing. You've been thrown into exile to die, really, to silence you so that your voice cannot come home. And so my whole life has been dedicated to saying, 'I will not be silenced.'

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

I feel as if I can take Indian stories, make them mine and take them to the world.

I'm a mongrel in the sense that I'm Spanish, English, Latino, Jewish, north, south - all these things are mixed in me.

Life may unfold chronologically for the body and for bureaucracies that keep track of such things as births, marriages, deaths, visas, tax returns, expulsions, and identity cards, but memory does not play this game in quite the same way, always manages to confound the desire for tidiness.

I'm the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it's the best of both possible worlds.

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.