Ariel Dorfman Quotes

Gerardo; People can die from an excessive dose of the truth, you know.

أفضل لحظات الحياة هى تلك التي لا ندري فيها ما يجب علينا عمله ، لأننا عندئذ فقط يا صغيري نكتشف قوتنا الداخلية ، ميلنا الحقيقي

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.

هذا أحد الأمور التي لا يمكن لنا حسمها : كيف سيدعونا الآخرون . نحن نعرف كيف سندعو أنفسنا وحسب

She was not willing to let others narrate her life and her death. While there is one person like her in this world, I will find myself defending both her right to struggle and our obligation to remember.

[El desierto] que parece recordar de todo lo que le ha pasado, que recuerda y que termina por destruir todo lo que le pasa.

That's all it takes, one person crying out in the ethical wilderness, one person and then one more and then another, that's all that's needed to keep the spark of justice alive

I'm really not sure if others fail to perceive me or if, one fraction of a second after my face interferes with their horizon, a millionth of second after they have cast their gaze on me, they already begin to wash me from their memory: forgotten before arriving at the scant, sad archangel of a remembrance.

A wave of embarrassment washed over him, and he checked to see if any of his posters had noticed. They stayed put, emotionless and impartial.

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!

the urgent task we need to undertake if we want a different sort of country is the task of extracting Pinochet from our minds, turning him into a terrible memory that will not return

Never, ever apologize if you haven't done anything wrong. Keep your sorrys and your excuse mes and your please forgive mes, above all keep your please, please forgive mes for the one moment in life when you'll really need them, need those words. And you will be in dire need of entreaties like these, oh you will be praying for those words, blessing yourself for not having wasted them on something spurious and unworthy. You will someday be kneeling, kneeling down in front of a pair of accusing eyes, threatening feet, feet that might kick you or feet that might do something worse. At times what we should dread most are feet that will run away, that will run away and leave us everlastingly alone. Loneliness is what should terrify you most, more than a slap or a kick or hunger even. And that's when those words, please, please forgive me, will be all that separates you from the pit and swamp of the deepest despair. So don't squander them on matters of no consequence. The world is cursed because people do not apologize for theirs sins or crimes or merely their cowardice, but it's even more cursed because people apologize much too much-- they use their regrets as a way of not really probing what the have done, as permission to persevere in their blindness, absolving themselves without having atoned or understood.

(...) 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.

بعد هم از من قول می‌گرفت هیچ‌وقت نگذارم معشوقم از پیشم برود، نه به جنگ و نه به شهری از پی کاری. می‌گفت مرد آدم مثل بدن آدم است و نباید لحظه‌ای از او غافل شوی. اما حالا دیگر دیرزمانی بود که معشوق‌های احتمالی‌مان را در ذهن مرور نمی‌کردیم، چون سال‌ها می‌شد که معشوق موجودی بود در دوردست‌ها، موجودی ناموجود.

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

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.

Grief, what a son of a bitch, Ariel, we have a surfeit of it, far too much, you and me and most of us in this century and the wreckage of centuries that came before. A son of a bitch, but absolutely necessary. Without pain, life means nothing. The tree needs the sound it makes as it falls, so it can be heard, at least in the future, its way of demanding witnesses. Which is why we need funeral rites, great or small, the outpouring of sorrow, the long and short good-bye, like the one your people have just held for Allende, why the worst sin is to disappear a body and deny the mourning, a crime against life because it doesn't allow life to go on, other trees to grow from the soil of the tree as it dies away. And that's why the refrain, do not speak ill of the dead, makes sense. We're not erasing the bad acts, the mistakes and blindness, the cruelty and selfishness, the damage caused to others. But it's healthy to rescue, at least once in each person's odyssey, what's best for the future. And if we become extinct? No last rites, no words about us, no stories told, death will have the last word. So we have to tell that story now, before it's too late.

-Es terrible perder una guerra. -Casi tan terrible como ganarla.

-Fue terrible descubrir que alguien que te odía sonreír un día y al otro día negarte. Me acuerdo de uno de mis amigos gritándome, mientras me golpeaban: "¡Por cobarde! ¡Por maricón!".

-Fue terrible descubrir que alguien te podía sonreír un día y al otro día negarte. Me acuerdo de uno de mis amigos gritándome, mientras me golpeaban: "¡Por cobarde! ¡Por maricón!".

-Ésa es una de las cosas que no podemos decidir: cómo van a llamarnos los demás. Solamente sabemos cómo vamos a llamarnos a nosotros mismos.

Los mejores momentos de la vida son aquellos en los cuales no sabemos qué hacer, porque solamente entonces, mi niño, descubrimos nuestra fuerza interior, nuestra verdadera vocación.

Son todos vulnerables. Pero tú más que nadie, mi niño, porque te pasarás la vida absorbiendo el dolor de los demás.

Though in our times we’ve forgotten how to listen to birds, to animals, what nature is trying to tell us.

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

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!

[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

For almost three decades, September 11 marked a day of infamy for Chileans, Latin Americans, and the world community—a day when Chilean air force jets attacked La Moneda palace in Santiago as the prelude to the vicious coup that brought Pinochet to power. In the aftermath of “9/11,” 2001, it is more likely to be remembered for the shocking terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With that horror, the United States and Chile now share “that dreadful date,” as writer Ariel Dorfman has eloquently described it, “again a Tuesday, once again an 11th of September filled with death.