10 Quotes by Aurora Levins Morales

The life I chose when I promised my six-year-old self never to forget being a child, never to grow frightened and dishonest like the grownups I saw, nodding politely to each other without affection, and decided to put my true self in a time capsule for later use.

I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and -peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise.

What is so dreadful is that to transform the traumatic we must re-enter it fully, and allow the full weight of grief to pass through our hearts. It is not possible to digest atrocity without tasting it first, without assessing on our tongues the full bitterness of it.

I say solidarity is knowing the future is long and wide, with room for everyone on earth to enter. I say it's taking the long view of the job. Helping you onto the wall, so you can reach down and pull me up. Lifting you into the tree, so you can shake down peaches for two. That solidarity is a two-way street, fires burning at both ends, and the only well in the middle.

They are charged with trespassing, which means being on your own land when somebody else wants it.

I am not african. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. I am not taina. Taino is in me, but there is no way back. I am european.Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am new. History made me. My first language is Spanglish. I was born at the crossroadsand I am whole.

What is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible.

The spiritual is whatever allows us to notice the miraculous nature of life.

When we rely on written records we need to continually ask ourselves what might be missing, what might have been recorded in order to manipulate events and in what direction, and in what ways we are allowing ourselves to assume that objectivity is in any way connected with literacy.