Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Edwidge Danticat

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

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.

Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.

People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe 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. -pg. 25

We still have our people working in the cane fields in the Dominican Republic. People are still repatriated all the time from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of being taken off buses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic still can't go to school and are forced to work in the sugarcane fields.

The whole history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is complicated. We share the island of Hispaniola, and Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic for twenty-two years after 1804 for fear that the French and Spanish would come back and reinstitute slavery. So we have this unique situation of being two independent nations on the same island, but with each community having its own grievance.

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.

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.

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

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

...women, brave as stars at dawn

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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."

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.

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

The best moment in writing any book is when you just can't wait to get back to the writing, when you can't wait to re-enter that fictional place, when your fictional town feels even more real than the town where you actually live.

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.

There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.

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

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.

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

The whole military structure in Haiti that existed until the early 1990s was put in place by the American occupation. At the top there were Southern white officers, who led an army that crushed the indigenous resistance - the cacos. A high-ranking U.S. officer said when he arrived, "To think these niggers speak French!" Later, Haitian officers attended the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. The threat from the U.S. is something that is always hanging over people's heads: If we don't behave, we'll have occupation again.

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.

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

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

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.

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

Art is a luxury but also a necessity.

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. . .

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

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.