Top 120 Edwidge Danticat Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “They say behind mountains are more mountains.”

— Edwidge Danticat

2. “Anger is a wasted emotion.”

— Edwidge Danticat

3. “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

4. “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

— Edwidge Danticat

5. “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

6. “It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.”

— Edwidge Danticat

7. “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

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

— Edwidge Danticat

9. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

10. “No one will love you more than you love your pain.”

— Edwidge Danticat

11. “Art is a luxury but also a necessity.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

13. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Edwidge Danticat

18. “There’s no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.”

— Edwidge Danticat

19. “That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art; it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.”

— Edwidge Danticat

20. “They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.”

— Edwidge Danticat

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

27. “Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.”

— Edwidge Danticat

28. “Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.”

— Edwidge Danticat

29. “Isabelle didn’t need to call my name. Not because of the twin telepathy thing people always talk about, but because we were holding hands. We were holding hands the tightest we have ever held hands in our entire lives. We were holding hands just as we had on the day we were born.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

31. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

32. “As immigrant artists for whom so much has been sacrificed, so many dreams have been deferred, we already doubt so much. Who do we think we are? We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who might have had a mother and father killed, either by a government or nature, even before we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy. I do.”

— Edwidge Danticat

33. “That night, I slept hugging my secret.”

— Edwidge Danticat

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

41. “When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that’s a little something extra between me and them. It’s like the Laurence Dunbar poem “We Wear the Mask.””

— Edwidge Danticat

42. “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

43. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

44. “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

45. “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

46. “There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.”

— Edwidge Danticat

47. “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.””

— Edwidge Danticat

48. “People aren’t really aware of what’s happening in other places.”

— Edwidge Danticat

49. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

50. “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.””

— Edwidge Danticat