Edwidge Danticat Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

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

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

...women, brave as stars at dawn

It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.

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."

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

The past is like the hair on our head. I moved to New York when I was twelve, but you always have this feeling that wherever you come from, you physically leave it, but it doesn't leave you.

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

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

They say behind mountains are more mountains.

Sometimes family members will ask to be kept out of certain things that I'm writing, and I try to respect that. I'd much rather have relatives than a book.

Anger is a wasted emotion.

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.