Chilean Writers Quotes

It is better to write than not to write. Poetry is subversive because it exposes you, tears you apart. You dare to distrust yourself. You dare to disobey. That's the idea, to disobey everyone. Disobey yourself. I don't know if I like my poems, but I know that if I hadn't written them I'd be dumber, more useless, more individualistic. I publish them because they're alive. I don't know if they're good, but they deserve to live.

I fell in love with my country because of the stories my grandfather told me and because of our travels together through the south. He taught me history and geography, showed me maps, made me read Chilean writers, corrected my grammar and handwriting. As a teacher, he was short on patience but long on severity; my errors made him red with anger, but if he was content with my work he would reward me with a wedge of Camembert cheese,

(A caution to aspiring writers: not everything you write is worth keeping for the benefit of future generations.) When she gave me that notebook, my mother somehow intuited that I would have to dig up my Chilean roots, and that lacking a land into which to sink them I would have to do that on paper.

After the Spanish Civil War, refugees came to Chile escaping the defeat. In 1939, the poet Pablo Neruda, at the direction of the Chilean government, chartered a ship, the Winnipeg, which sailed from Marseilles carrying a cargo of intellectuals, writers, artists, physicians, engineers, and fine craftsmen.

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.

It was geography that mattered more than anything else in the relationship. Distances between Chile and the United States were simply too great for national interests to clash too seriously; pretty much all the two countries shared was the Western Hemisphere and an anticolonial birth. To most Chileans the North Americans were, in the words of one historian, “a cipher,” and most North Americans would have been hard-pressed to name a Chilean writer, musician, or politician, even the capital. “Chile” would never be a category on Jeopardy! It was just an oddly shaped country far to the south. Little wonder that Henry Kissinger, in one of his not infrequent moments of sarcasm, explained Chile’s importance to Washington’s policymakers by calling it “a dagger pointed straight at the heart of Antarctica.