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Edwidge Danticat
72 quotes
“We are ill-favored, but still we endure. Every once in a while, we must scream this as far as the wind can carry our voices. "Nou lèd, nou la!" We are ugly, but we are here! And here to stay.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Watching the news reports, it is often hard to tell whether there are real living and breathing women in conflict-stricken places like Haiti. The evening news broadcasts only allow us brief glimpses of presidential coups, rejected boat people, and sabotaged elections The women's stories never manage to make the front page. But they do exist.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the heart of these protests is also the obligation of a country that needs, yet despises, those who comprise a large percentage of its fundamental workforce. Should we desire in our midst a group of people only when they’re willing to do for less pay the work that our own citizens find too grueling, too demeaning, or too hazardous? The moral question aside, what does it say about our own societal structure that we cannot within our own borders make these jobs more appealing and more humane for our own citizens?”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Out of the Shadows" (May 23, 2006)
“On this anniversary, while remembering the dead and celebrating those still living, I also want to recognize more than ever the marginalized members of Haitian society—people like my grandparents and their grandparents, poor, urban and rural, self-reliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti. Without their full inclusion and participation in the reconstruction of their country, Haiti will never fully succeed.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Anniversary Blues" (January 10, 2012)
“This day, more than any other, should remind us that everyone seeking asylum deserves to be treated humanely.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: World Refugee Day" (June 20, 2013)
“First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you’ve heard about long-haul narrative. They’re your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Afterword to 2015 edition of Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994)
“most of my tourism is done through books.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Dawn After the Tempests" (Nov. 6, 2017)
“Well, I think that when I’m writing about Haiti, I’m just writing one long, ongoing story. But I really did feel, like a lot of people did, that after the earthquake, there were suddenly two Haitis: the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So I feel that I’ve been writing about the first one much longer. And writing about the earthquake... it’s been such a short period of time and it’s still such a raw experience that the few things that I’ve written about it, I feel like I’ve written them to process it myself.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how she views Haiti since a major earthquake in in “An Interview | Edwidge Danticat” in The Brooklyn Review (Fall 2018)
“It comes on again on her grandson's christening day. A lost moment, a blank spot, one that Carole does not know how to measure. She is there one second, then she is not. She knows exactly where she is, then she does not.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Everything Inside (2019), first lines of "Sunrise, Sunset
“The person she'd been when the three of them, she and her husband and her son, had gotten on that boat and left Haiti-that person was also lost at sea.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Everything Inside (2019), in the story "Without Inspection
“A flattened and drying daffodil was dangling off the little card that I had made my aunt Atie for Mother's Day. I pressed my palm over the flower and squashed it against the plain beige cardboard. (first lines)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tante Atie once said that 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. (p91)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you see my granddaughter?...Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?" (chapter 14, p103)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only good deeds demand respect." (chapter 15, p110)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That night, I slept hugging my secret. (p112)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...The things one does, one should do out of love." (chapter 17 p118)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it is very good that she has learned to read," I said. "It is her own freedom." (chapter 17 p118)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'...She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.' (p155)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.' (p165)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'It is the calm and silent waters that drown you...' (p172)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p234)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it's true. 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. I see you crying like a crushed snail, the way you cried when I helped you pull out your first loose tooth. Yes, I did love you then. Somehow when I looked at you, I thought of fiery red ants. I wanted you to dig your fingernails into my skin and drain out all my blood. (beginning of "Children of the Sea")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away? ("Children of the Sea")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ("Children of the Sea")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them." ("A Wall of Fire Rising")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cringe from the heat of the night on my face. I feel as bare as open flesh. Tonight I am much older than the twenty-five years that I have lived. The night is the time I dread most in my life. Yet if I am to live, I must depend on it. (beginning of "Night Women")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We were playing with leaves shaped like butterflies. Raymond limped from the ashes of the old schoolhouse and threw himself on top of a high pile of dirt. The dust rose in clouds around him, clinging to the lapels of his khaki uniform. (beginning of "The Missing Peace")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was a cool September day when I walked out of a Brooklyn courtroom holding my naturalization certificate. As I stood on the courthouse steps, I wanted to run back to my mother's house waving the paper like the head of an enemy rightfully conquered in battle. (beginning of "Caroline's Wedding")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. ("Caroline's Wedding")”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse, unruly strands and attempting to bring them into 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 in 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. (epilogue)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'...Did the stars visit him upon me in caprice? To teach me that a lifetime can be vast as a hundred years or sudden as a few breaths? Enjoy this one you have left. It all passes so fast. In the time it takes to draw a breath.' (p116)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'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.' (p145)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Freedom is a passing thing,' a man said. 'Someone can always come and snatch it away.' (p212)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share. (p252)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p265)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.” (p276)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father is gone. I'm slouched in a cast-aluminum chair across from two men, one the manager of the hotel where we're staying and the other a policeman. They're both waiting for me to explain what's become of him, my father. (first lines)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that 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 also lose it on your own terms. (p201)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the advantages 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. So too with catastrophes and disasters, which inevitably force you to rethink facile allegiances. (Chapter 8, p 112)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All artists, writers among them, have several stories-one might call them creation myths-that haunt and obsess them.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do. We think we are people who might not have been able to go to school at all, who might never have learned to read and write. We think we are the children of people who have lived in the shadows for too long.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reading, and perhaps ultimately writing, is nothing like living in a place and time where two very young men are killed in a way that is treated like entertainment.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nomad or immigrant who learns something rightly must always ponder travel and movement, just as the grief-stricken must inevitably ponder death.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps, just as Alice Walker writes of her own forebears in her essay "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," my blood ancestors-unlike my literary ancestors-were so weather-beaten, terror-stricken, and maimed that they were stifled. As a result, those who somehow managed to create became, in my view, martyrs and saints.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a freak wave, measuring between ten and twelve feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose. Claire's father, Nozias, a fisherman, was one of many who saw it in the distance as he walked toward his sloop. He first heard a low rumbling, like that of distant thunder, then saw a wall of water rise from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue, trying, it seemed, to lick a pink sky. (first lines)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...she was like a starfish, that she constantly needed to have a piece of her break off and walk away in order for her to become something new. (p143)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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? (p152)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. (p154)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“remember that love is like kerosene. The more you have, the more you burn. (p199)”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My work allows me to exorcise my ghosts. I purge the pain from it. The words are my tears on the page. Perhaps I'd be less serene without it. I tend to be melancholy. The work helps me to put that on the page.”
Edwidge Danticat (born 1969) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2009 interview included in Conversations with Edwidge Danticat edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (2017)