Ariel Dorfman Quotes

You can survive with anger, but you can’t live with it forever.

Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you some grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person’s body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination.

We can live with lots of things, but we can’t live without imagination, we can’t live without hope.

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.

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

Responsibility without power, the fate of the secretary through the ages.

Most writers who leave their country physically have already left it mentally and emotionally.

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

I don’t believe in God, but I believe in angels.

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.

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