Best 120 quotes of Edwidge Danticat on MyQuotes

Edwidge Danticat

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    America's relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, "Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    I can't wait for both my daughters to be old enough to read all my books. I loved it every time I saw my parents acting like more than just my parents. And I'm looking forward to that with my daughters too. I am looking forward to having them discover me as someone completely other than their mother.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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

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    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?

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

    I'm not saying Cubans don't deserve asylum, but if it is a national security issue, there are people who are coming from Cuba on hijacked airplanes. Why isn't that a national security issue?

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    I remember reading an interview with a writer who said that in nonfiction if you have one lie it sort of messes it up. But in fiction the real details give you so much more credibility, because people do so much research just to write fiction. In fiction you're trying to recreate something lifelike.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    I think we all wear some kind of mask. There are masks that shield us from others, but there are masks that embolden us, and you see that in carnival. The shiest child puts on a mask and can do anything and be anybody.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    It seemed from the media that we were being told that all Haitians had AIDS. At the time, I had just come from Haiti. I was twelve years old, and the building I was living in had primarily Haitians. A lot of people got fired from their jobs. At school, sometimes in gym class, we'd be separated because teachers were worried about what would happen if we bled. So there was really this intense discrimination.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    Edwidge Danticat

    It's not a matter of whether the reviews of your books are good or bad, it's about being taken seriously, both as a woman writer and as a writer of color. Also, it worries me when people point to a couple of women writers or writers of color who get some attention - and I am sometimes pulled into that category - to prove that others are getting a fair shot. It's like those people who keep saying that racism no longer exists in this country because Barack Obama was a President of the United States.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    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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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Edwidge Danticat

    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.