Ariel Dorfman quotes

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, playwright, and human rights activist known for his works addressing political oppression and exile. His writing often explores themes of memory, justice, and the struggles of Latin America. He has received international acclaim for plays like "Death and the Maiden" and continues to speak out on issues of human rights. Here are 20 of his quotes:

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.

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

There's a tendency, especially among revolutionaries, to only show the good side of yourself and then when you come to power, the bad side comes out.

Ariel Dorfman

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.

Ariel Dorfman

Those who have never suffered the iniquities of exile cannot possibly understand the significance, the gravitas, of a mattress.

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman

The past is really unknowable, but it's got to be knowable enough so that we can seek forgiveness for our crimes...

Ariel Dorfman

More than a traveler, I'm a displacer. In other words, I'm a person who is constantly meditating on what it means not to arrive at a place, but to be on my way somewhere else.

Ariel Dorfman

Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer...If you can deal with it. If it doesn't destroy you.

Ariel Dorfman

I think the genre decides for me-which sounds like a way of avoiding the question unless I explain first that this chameleon-like border crossing, this shifting of genre identities is, I realize, parallel to, or anticipates, or recollects my own life. I'm probably fluctuating across genres perhaps because my identity itself is always in flux...

Ariel Dorfman

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.

Ariel Dorfman

Mining created Chile. The story of men who go down into the mountain and chip away at minerals in the darkness and then suffer an accident that leaves them at the mercy of that darkness is part of the DNA of Chile, an integral part of the country's history.

Ariel Dorfman

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

Ariel Dorfman