Edwidge Danticat quotes
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“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 DanticatSource : Edwidge Danticat (2003). “Breath, Eyes, Memory”, p.48, Soho Press
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“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 DanticatSource : FaceBook post by Edwidge Danticat from Oct 31, 2013
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“People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.”
-- Edwidge DanticatSource : Edwidge Danticat (2004). “Krik? Krak!”, p.16, Soho Press
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“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 -
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“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 DanticatSource : FaceBook post by Edwidge Danticat from Oct 29, 2013
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“When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.”
-- Edwidge DanticatSource : FaceBook post by Edwidge Danticat from Jul 12, 2011
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“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 DanticatSource : Edwidge Danticat (2011). “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work”, p.10, Vintage
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“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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
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“To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.”
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“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 DanticatSource : Source: www.vanityfair.com
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“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 -
“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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“Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“No one will love you more than you love your pain.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“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 -
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“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“They say behind mountains are more mountains.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“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 -
“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
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“On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.”
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“There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?" My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips. Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
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“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 DanticatSource : "The Farming of Bones". Book by Edwidge Danticat, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 1998.
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“Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.”
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“It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“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 DanticatSource : Edwidge Danticat (2004). “Krik? Krak!”, p.14, Soho Press
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“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.”
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“People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.”
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“People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti.”
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“People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
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“Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.”
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“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.”
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“In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“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 -
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“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 -
“There are many possible interpretations of what it means to create dangerously, and Albert Camus, like the poet Osip Mandelstam, suggests that it is creating as a revolt against silence, creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, 'Let me cross over,' the men of Gilead asked him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he replied, 'No,' they said, 'All right, say Shibboleth.' If he said, 'Sibboleth,' because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Fourty-thousand were killed at the time.”
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“More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
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“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 -
“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 -
“And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
“In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.”
-- Edwidge Danticat -
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“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
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