Edwidge Danticat quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Edwidge Danticat on Wise Famous Quotes.

Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.

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.

We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.

I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.

You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.

Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.

There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."

In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.

They say behind mountains are more mountains.

We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.

I owe Oprah and that show a tremendous debt.

Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

No one will ever love you more than you love your pain," he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. She

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.

Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.

Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.

I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

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

...women, brave as stars at dawn

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.

Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.

Two mountains can never meet but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.

Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other" -Giselle

That night, I slept hugging my secret.

It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.

We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old

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.

They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.

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.

She made sadness beautiful

Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us (Danticat 19).

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.

Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.

I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.

Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.

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.

The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.

Anger is a wasted emotion.

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.

The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.

I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.

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."

Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.

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.

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.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.

People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.

No one will love you more than you love your pain.

We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.

What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house?

Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.

To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.

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.

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.