Marjorie Agosín > Quotes

“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?”
― Marjorie Agosín, I Lived on Butterfly Hill

“Tears are for happiness.”
― Marjorie Agosín, I Lived on Butterfly Hill

“I have been so busy asking for faith that I forgot to ask for patience.”
― Marjorie Agosín, I Lived on Butterfly Hill

“I entered the City of Books, dark jewels hoarded in temples and cathedrals. In this city I found buried candelabra and stories waiting to be read during nights of sea and moon. I loved the City of Books where lost gazelles wandered in search of signs.”
― Marjorie Agosín, Cartographies: Meditations on Travel

“Sometimes remembering means to live a moment in the past again, and in that way survive the present.”
― Marjorie Agosín, I Lived on Butterfly Hill

“An illness called nostalgia, which often is cured with a sprinkle of love, some lemon, a few raisins and many slices of avocado.

Wine is a yellow sun in a crystal goblet. One taste of Chile's earth and sky could delight the entire world.

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.

A refugee - a beautiful word, a beautiful thing. An exile. That means I am a traveler of the world and I belong to nothing but the things I love.”
― Marjorie Agosín, I Lived on Butterfly Hill

“My father says that believing or not believing doesn't matter; what is important is speaking with God.”
― Marjorie Agosín, A Cross and a Star: Memoirs of a Jewish Girl in Chile

“A Woman Sleeps on an Island"

translated by Cola Franzen

A woman sleeps on an island
and from her hair is born the dwelling place
of memories and wild birds.
Her body is a figurehead,
and they say that since
she fell asleep on the island
she seems to have been touched by the rains
of madness, that her hair blossoms each evening
next to the music of the sea. Others say
her eyelids trace maps of strange geographies,
savage tattoos kept only in the tenuous
circle of her dreams.

A woman sleeps on an island
and stops being herself,
free now of the land.
She sails and drinks
the vastness of the sea.
Seeds fill her floating hair;
she is an island
surrounded by stars.”
― Marjorie Agosín

“Never a goodbye, always a see you later.”
― Marjorie Agosín

“I want to show Miss Rose how much more I can do this year because she has helped me so much with my English.”
― Marjorie Agosín, I Lived on Butterfly Hill