"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 Literature See all quotes by Ariel Dorfman →

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“The past is really unknowable, but it’s got to be knowable enough so that we can seek forgiveness for our crimes…”

“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.”

“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…”

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