Top 100 Danticat Quotes
#1. Often when we read, especially when we are younger, we are looking for a mirror, echoes of our voices, people who might look and sound like us.... Write for the twelve-year-old girl, who is looking at a mirror, at a window.
~Edwidge Danticat
Donna Everhart
#2. Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us (Danticat 19).
Edwidge Danticat
#3. The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.
Junot Diaz
#4. And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
Edwidge Danticat
#5. 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
#6. These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.
Edwidge Danticat
#7. Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
Edwidge Danticat
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness.
Edwidge Danticat
#11. I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
Edwidge Danticat
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall
Edwidge Danticat
#15. 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
#16. Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.
Edwidge Danticat
#17. I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share.
Edwidge Danticat
#18. The girl she said, I didn't tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don't want to lose them.
Edwidge Danticat
#19. 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
#20. Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home.
Edwidge Danticat
#21. 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
#22. I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."
Edwidge Danticat
#23. Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.
Edwidge Danticat
#24. 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
#25. I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
Edwidge Danticat
#27. 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
#28. I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
Edwidge Danticat
#29. 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
#30. We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
Edwidge Danticat
#31. We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old
Edwidge Danticat
#32. 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
#33. People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.
Edwidge Danticat
#34. 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
#35. They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.
Edwidge Danticat
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.
Edwidge Danticat
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
Edwidge Danticat
#44. People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.
Edwidge Danticat
#46. To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.
Edwidge Danticat
#47. Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.
Edwidge Danticat
#49. 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
#50. I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children's inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.
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. On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way.
Edwidge Danticat
#53. You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.
Edwidge Danticat
#54. That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.
Edwidge Danticat
#56. Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.
Edwidge Danticat
#58. People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn't true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.
Edwidge Danticat
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. For the majority of the people it is a difficult place to live. That's a reality that we can't ignore. But there is also great beauty to it.
Edwidge Danticat
#64. To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
Edwidge Danticat
#65. 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
#67. The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
Edwidge Danticat
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. I see the sharp inequality between how Haitian and Cuban refugees are treated in Florida. Both groups come here because their lives are equally desperate. But on arrival, the Haitians are incarcerated, and some are immediately repatriated, whereas Cubans get to stay and are eligible for citizenship.
Edwidge Danticat
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. 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
#77. My mother used to say that we'll all have three death: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.
Edwidge Danticat
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. When that day of jubilee finally arrives, all of us will be there with you, walking, heads held high, crowns a-glitter, because we do have a right to be here.
Edwidge Danticat
#82. All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.
Edwidge Danticat
#83. 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
#84. Manman tells papa, you cannot let them kill somebody just because you are afraid. Papa says, oh yes, you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid. They are the law. It is their right.
Edwidge Danticat
#85. I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.
Edwidge Danticat
#86. People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
Edwidge Danticat
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. That's whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through - whenever they are in the news, that's when they exist. If you don't see them they don't exist.
Edwidge Danticat
#90. 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
#91. Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
Edwidge Danticat
#92. 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
#93. I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.
Edwidge Danticat
#94. 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
#95. The past is like the hair on our head. I moved to New York when I was twelve, but you always have this feeling that wherever you come from, you physically leave it, but it doesn't leave you.
Edwidge Danticat
#96. 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
#97. We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
Edwidge Danticat
#98. What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house?
Edwidge Danticat
#99. 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
#100. I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there.
Edwidge Danticat
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