Chilean voices speak with dry humor and weathered tenderness, shaped by cordilleras, tremors, and Pacific winds. Sayings carry picardÃa and camaraderie, a quick wink before the next hardship; literature turns that same grit into luminous memory, exile, and desire. From market stalls to the poetry of Neruda and Mistral, the language values brevity, irony, and a stubborn hope called aguante. Mapuche roots echo in respect for the land, while city slang snaps with present-tense urgency. The result: intimate wisdom, lightly salted, never grandiose, pero de verdad.
"Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed"
"Clearly it is better that, when someone is wanted by the international police, and this person travels, and a country knows about it, that country reports the fact"
"At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues"
"We need to be more careful, but more compassionate. We must strike, not deal with terrorists, but to broaden our understanding of the world outside our borders"
"We fully support the strikes against terrorist targets, not against the country, not against the culture, not against a religion, but against an enemy of them all"
"But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie"
