Top 100 Edwidge Danticat Quotes
#1. I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.
Edwidge Danticat
#3. I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.
Edwidge Danticat
#4. I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.
Edwidge Danticat
#5. Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically ...
Edwidge Danticat
#6. I am very timid about speaking for the collective. I can say what I see, I can say what I've heard, I can say what I feel, but I can't speak for - no one can speak for - 10 million people, and it takes away something from them if you make yourself their voice.
Edwidge Danticat
#7. So much had fallen into the sea. Hats fell in to the sea. Hearts fell into the sea. So much had fallen into the sea
Edwidge Danticat
#8. I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to
Edwidge Danticat
#11. To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
Edwidge Danticat
#13. But there's something about music, when you feel it deeply, when you understand it so well, the way Isabelle understands it, there is something about it that makes scary things seem to disappear. If only for a little while" -Giselle
Edwidge Danticat
#14. For so long this had been my life, but it was all in the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.
Edwidge Danticat
#15. I think it's hard for an outsider to capture the flavor of a community and all its nuances, so ultimately Haitian-Americans need to start sharing intimate accounts of their stories.
Edwidge Danticat
#17. Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.
Edwidge Danticat
#19. You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.
Edwidge Danticat
#20. If they come into a house and there is a son and a mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. They make the son sleeps with his mother. If it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing.
Edwidge Danticat
#21. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head. -pg. 25
Edwidge Danticat
#22. What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house?
Edwidge Danticat
#23. The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.
Edwidge Danticat
#24. I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them?
Edwidge Danticat
#25. I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.
Edwidge Danticat
#26. After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.
Edwidge Danticat
#27. Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
Edwidge Danticat
#28. Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.
Edwidge Danticat
#29. In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.
Edwidge Danticat
#30. The people did not elect me. I speak with one voice that may echo other people, but I am part of a group of people. That's not distancing yourself from a community, that's also allowing the space for others to speak for themselves.
Edwidge Danticat
#31. People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
Edwidge Danticat
#32. How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?
Edwidge Danticat
#33. Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.
Edwidge Danticat
#34. It's hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they'll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.
Edwidge Danticat
#35. There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.
Edwidge Danticat
#36. I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
Edwidge Danticat
#37. Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.
Edwidge Danticat
#38. Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.
Edwidge Danticat
#39. Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.
Edwidge Danticat
#40. My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It's true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.
Edwidge Danticat
#41. I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share.
Edwidge Danticat
#42. Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.
Edwidge Danticat
#43. Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.
Edwidge Danticat
#44. Two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall
Edwidge Danticat
#45. AIDS was something that was put upon us [as haitians], and we were immediately identified with it. That is unfair. That is unjust. I always say, "We are all people living with AIDS." It's not like you can avoid it. It's part of our world.
Edwidge Danticat
#46. Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other" -Giselle
Edwidge Danticat
#47. I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
Edwidge Danticat
#48. It is perhaps the great discomfort of those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor of the world outside.
Edwidge Danticat
#49. It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.
Edwidge Danticat
#51. The soldiers can come and do with us what they want. That makes papa feel weak, she says. He gets angry when he feels weak.
Edwidge Danticat
#52. In fact that is the struggle that most Americans - As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way.
Edwidge Danticat
#53. To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.
Edwidge Danticat
#55. It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
Edwidge Danticat
#56. Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.
Edwidge Danticat
#57. I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.
Edwidge Danticat
#58. Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.
Edwidge Danticat
#59. Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.
Edwidge Danticat
#60. My head fills up with images of past gatherings there: pep rallies, award ceremonies, talent shows, speaker days, career days, holiday pageants, all things that Isabelle and I attended together, even while sitting in different parts of the auditorium with our own sets of friends.
Edwidge Danticat
#62. They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.
Edwidge Danticat
#63. Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.
Edwidge Danticat
#64. People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.
Edwidge Danticat
#65. Old age is not meant to be survived alone," Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. "Death should come gently, slowly, like a man's hand approaching your body. There can be joy in impatience if there is time to find the joy.
Edwidge Danticat
#66. We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old
Edwidge Danticat
#67. You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.
Edwidge Danticat
#68. I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
Edwidge Danticat
#69. In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Edwidge Danticat
#70. I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?
Edwidge Danticat
#71. Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.
Edwidge Danticat
#72. You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.
Edwidge Danticat
#73. Isabelle didn't need to call my name. Not because of the twin telepathy thing people always talk about, but because we were holding hands. We were holding hands the tightest we have ever held hands in our entire lives. We were holding hands just as we had on the day we were born.
Edwidge Danticat
#74. If there is a heaven, it should be like all the places you love or the places you've never been but wish you'd visited while you were still alive." -Giselle
Edwidge Danticat
#75. Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.
Edwidge Danticat
#76. Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.
Edwidge Danticat
#77. I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.
Edwidge Danticat
#78. I think we all wear some kind of mask. There are masks that shield us from others, but there are masks that embolden us, and you see that in carnival. The shiest child puts on a mask and can do anything and be anybody.
Edwidge Danticat
#79. The Attorney General made another astonishing claim, that there were Pakistani terrorists possibly coming on these boats from Haiti. No one has ever seen a Pakistani coming on a boat from Haiti yet.
Edwidge Danticat
#80. I think all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.
Edwidge Danticat
#81. I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.
Edwidge Danticat
#83. There was the stench of kerosene and burning tires wafting through the air. It was only a matter of time before the rubber smell would be replaced with that of flesh.
Edwidge Danticat
#84. When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.
Edwidge Danticat
#85. To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.
Edwidge Danticat
#86. We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
Edwidge Danticat
#87. This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.
Edwidge Danticat
#88. No one will ever love you more than you love your pain," he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. She
Edwidge Danticat
#89. The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.
Edwidge Danticat
#90. Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
Edwidge Danticat
#91. You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.
Edwidge Danticat
#92. People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.
Edwidge Danticat
#93. One of the advantage of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you. The language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die speaking have no choice but to find a common place in your brain and regularly merge there.
Edwidge Danticat
#94. This was a "bad" example for U.S. slaves. Haiti was subjected to an embargo from the United States, which, along with many other countries, refused to recognize this new republic.
Edwidge Danticat
#95. Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.
Edwidge Danticat
#96. Even from those very first hours, Claire was an easy and quiet child. It was as though she already knew that she could not afford to be picky or make demands.
Edwidge Danticat
#97. Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.
Edwidge Danticat
#98. When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
Edwidge Danticat
#99. I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
Edwidge Danticat
#100. If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
Edwidge Danticat
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