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Marjorie Agosín
89 quotes
“antisemitism has always existed in Latin America, as evidenced by the many nations that remained neutral during the Second World War. The barbarism of the Nazis was often praised in military circles, and some Latin American countries only joined the Allies because of pressure from the United States. One of the few Latin American intellectuals who stood up against fascism and spoke about the impending fate of European Jews was Gabriela Mistral...”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to the second edition of The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America (2022), translated from the Spanish
“Human rights were implemented by a group of Western nations in response to the moral crimes that occurred during World War II. Yet the same nations that ratified their declaration remain unable to protect their own citizens. The strength of a literature that denounces and questions, that speaks and implies that its own citizens can decide through the power of their voices and words, becomes effective in denouncing the moral vacuum in which the abuses took place.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to Writing Toward Hope: The Literature of Human Rights in Latin America (2006) Translated from the Spanish by Monica Bruno Galmozzi
“The possibilities of language reside in the possibilities of faith; they are a form of redeeming and correcting world history and paying tribute to life in all its wonder. These poems were written by a spirit that wishes to be part of a history that does not cover but on the contrary reveals and is clear in the blinding light of every silence.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Death in the Desert: The Women of Ciudad Juárez" in Women Writing Resistance: Essays on Latin America and the Caribbean edited by Jennifer Browdy (2003)
“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.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry, which is always with me and brings me to privileged horizons and uncertain but always true pathways”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The search for identity and belonging is also a motif for the human condition of the twentieth century-a century defined by displacements and migrations.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 2000 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Forward to Miriam's Daughters: Jewish Latin American Women Poets (2000)
“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.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Always Living in Spanish" essay in Poets and Writers (spring 1999), quoted in Invisible Dreamer (2002)
“These narrators show that written history contains the lyricism of poetry and the rational insanity of passion. They teach us that History and these smaller histories spring from an intimate, delicate conscience where memory attempts not only to preserve the great events of History such as wars, conquests, and triumphs, but also in the daily history that is created in a park, in the depths of the ocean, or in the ancient icon of the family.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 1989 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to Landscapes of a New Land: Short Fiction by Latin American Women (1989)
“More than anything, fantastic literature offers territories and spaces for subversion, disorder and illegality by using the only code possible: the imaginary. The fantastic, whatever genre it occupies, has the option or, better said, the desire to act through what has been culturally defined as forbidden and marginal. By talking and writing about the forbidden, about zones of silence, fantastic literature resides in the area of the always possible.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reflections on the Fantastic" Translated from the Spanish by Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman. In Secret Weavers: Stories of the Fantastic by Women Writers of Argentina and Chile (1992)
“The blue cloud finally opens-just when the bell rings to let the Juana Ross School out for the weekend. (first sentence)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her face is beaming, lit from within by a memory. (p39)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't understand how equality can be dangerous. How could it make someone...anyone...angry? (p62)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That night the voice on the radio calls what is happening to Chile "the restoration of order to the country." I write the words down in my notebook and wonder what was out of order before? (p91)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone is always learning something new," my father would remind me when he checked to see if I was doing my homework and found me gazing out the window at the stars. "If not, why be alive?” (p184)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe once you are an exile, you always are an exile. Always missing somewhere else, always carrying a bit from here and a bit from there and always with a bit of a broken heart. (p280)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have been so busy asking for faith that I forgot to ask for patience. (p330)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...sometimes memory is dangerous, but on most occasions it can be a salvation. Sometimes remembering means to live a moment in the past again, and in that way survive the present." (p357)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want literature to be a means for creating humility. (Introduction)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“children are a universal treasure...I believe that the best way to determine if a country is defending its human rights is to see how the children of that country live. (Introduction)”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a child I would always be asked whether I was Jewish or Chilean and, thus, my identity became always conflicted, always a matter of either/or and seldom both. ("Jewish Women in Latin America")”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Home, for many Jews, was their existence in the Diaspora, their perpetual state of homelessness. Home was that place where they sought refuge from persecution and discrimination. However, the Jews are not and have not been alone in”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only while in nature's perfection—where there is no difference between the outside world and myself and, at the same time, my own indifference—have I truly felt that I belonged.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are what we remember and we understand heritage and belonging through our own passion to remember. Home is a living scrap-book of memory that we carry as we move about, as we remember the vanquished and their respective passions and sorrows. Memory can never reside in abstraction. Memory must be cemented into concrete, must be worn like a dress, must be lived in like a home of differing levels, textures, and colors.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Home is understanding and being understood.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The translation of art, the translation of poetry, however, is the translation of the spirit. A good translator translates what is not said.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that memory is a form of translation. What motivates the artistic expression of poets and fiction writers, essayists and painters is memory. But memory is also very complicated because it consists of what one chooses to remember.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“how to become someone else-that's perhaps the greatest challenge for a translator because to become someone else is to become compassionate. To become someone else, you have to be in love with someone else. And in that sense I strongly believe that translations are acts of love”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To write in Spanish is for me a gesture of survival, and because of translation my memory has now become a part of the memory of others. Translators are not traitors, as the proverb says, traductores, traidores--but rather splendid friends in this great human community of language.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Since the earliest history, poetry and the spoken word have been the pulse of human civilization.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing and culture are very much related to the possibilities of the human imagination. The capacity of language allows the imagination to flow and to transform and mend the world.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books unite people and books in translation are the thresholds of other cultures, invitations to travel and to know others.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I imagine the Torah as the great book of the world handed from person to person and generation to generation so that we may remember what unites us and to help us imagine that in all lands there is the possibility of creating a history and participating in it. Books have the strength to create a mutual complicity between writer and reader and they allow the great human family to celebrate through words the memories of other times and places.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 words.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be Jewish in Chile was to be above all a foreigner”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The words, such ample, respectable ladies, were fraught with the possibility of love beyond diminutives. I never stopped writing in Spanish because I could not abandon my essence, the fragile, divine core of my being. It would have meant becoming someone else, frequenting sadness, losing a soul and all the butterflies. I always spoke Spanish, even in my most solemn dreams. I did not want to translate myself.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I dream the dream of stories not yet told and my lips begin to tell them out loud.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At times of great political repression, literature acquires a powerful function: It legitimizes artistic expression in a totalitarian society whose government prohibits this expression. Women writers, through their words and stories, manage to reaffirm what the greater society has denied. Paradoxically, if patriarchal societies have historically denied the presence of women writers, and also those who write about politics, the existence of extreme conditions due to political and civil violence has allowed these women writers to create and through their texts become visible.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My activism in human rights was born from various conditions that came together: I was Jewish, female, and an exile.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Latin American writer of the 1970s, like the journalist, cinematographer, and photographer, is the one who prevents the truth from disappearing, the one who searches for the testimony of eyewitnesses, of the forgotten ones, offering a taste of life and validity to the word. Written literature, oral testimonies, and public performances on forbidden streets demonstrate that Latin America hums with life despite the collective massacres, book burnings, and obligatory silence.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The function of the writer and journalist is to present the truth. Latin America writers have demonstrated that to present the truth is more than an ethical posture for them because they are taking risks that may result in their exile, torture, or death. Many writers have been killed by fascist forces. Others have preferred exile and contribute to the history of their respective countries from the outside. All of them continue to construct new vocabularies that rescue memory and create something beautiful, good, and noble from pain and the most terrible conditions of human existence.”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me there was happiness in churches, their wax candles giving sermons, their dim lukewarmth, their delicate twilight silence that rustles when the devout make the sign of the cross facing the figure of that barefoot, sweaty man, deathly cold. (first lines of "Wax Candles")”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And we prepared quickly for sleep. The mist crackled in the deep heart of the travelling night. We, too, were of a cross-roads, wounded by the pleasure of watching. We were in Austria and I thought of the wounds of my grandfather and of the music of Mozart, like a stream, like a litany, like a fragrance. Then I learned perhaps to be happy in those hospitable, desolate meadows, because the war had erased every trace of scars and only in certain looks were hollow aches and the calamity of dead children still preserved. (beginning of "The Eiderdown")”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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")”
Marjorie Agosín (1955–2025) said by 2025 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source