Edwidge Danticat Quotes & Sayings

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

I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles. — Edwidge Danticat

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

We used pesi, perejil, parsley, the damp summer morningness of it, the mingled sprigs, bristly and coarse, gentle and docile all at once, tasteless and bitter when chewed, a sweetened win wind inside the mouth, the leaves a different taste than the stalk, all this we savored for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides of old aches and griefs, to shed a passing year's dust as a new one dawned, to wash a new infant's hair for the first time and--along with boiled orange leaves--a corpse's remains one final time. — Edwidge Danticat

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

I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I'd just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart. — Edwidge Danticat

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

I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me. — 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.
- Judges 12:4-6 — Edwidge Danticat

Father Romain always made much of our being from the same place, just as Sebatstien did. Most people here did. It was a way of being joined to your old life through the presence of another person. At times you could sit for a whole evening with such individuals, just listening to their existence unfold, from the house where they were born to the hill where they wanted to be buried. It was their way of returning home, with you as a witness or as someone to bring them back to the present ... — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

...women, brave as stars at dawn — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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

After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together. — Edwidge Danticat

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

She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. 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. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing is the way I participate in the struggle. — Edwidge Danticat

The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears - though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence - still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military "aid" helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly. — Edwidge Danticat

Those who die young, they are cheated," she said. "Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they're cheated because they don't know it's coming. They don't have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you're going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don't even think you have bones when you're young, even when you break them, you don't believe you have them. But when you're old, they start reminding you they're there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you're walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no? — Edwidge Danticat

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

Art is a luxury but also a necessity. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

Sometimes we mask ourselves to further reveal ourselves, and it's always been connected to me with being a writer: We tell lies to tell a greater truth. The story is a mask; the characters you create are masks. That appeals to me. Aside from that, too, in the carnival the masks were beautiful, and offered a vision of Haitian creativity. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence. — Edwidge Danticat

Language is such a powerful thing. After the earthquake, I went to Haiti and people were talking about how [they] described this feeling of going through an earthquake. People really didn't have the vocabulary - before we had hurricanes. I'd talk with people and they'd say, "We have to name it; it has to have a name." — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one will love you more than you love your pain. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames. — Edwidge Danticat

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

At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it's never been an infant's whimper, a boy's whisper, a young man's mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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

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

Instead I dreamt of walking out of the world, of spending all my time inside with no one to talk to, and no one to talk to me. All I wanted was a routine, a series of sterile acts that I could perform without dedication or effort, a life where everything was constantly the same, where every day passed exactly like the one before. — Edwidge Danticat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They say behind mountains are more mountains. — Edwidge Danticat