Top 120 Edwidge Danticat Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

52. “If a woman is worth remembering,′ said my grandmother, ’there is no need to have her name carved in letters.”

— Edwidge Danticat

53. “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

54. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

56. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

57. “Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.”

— Edwidge Danticat

58. “On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

60. “It’s interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn’t overcome, you wouldn’t be writing it.”

— Edwidge Danticat

61. “To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.”

— Edwidge Danticat

62. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

63. “When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you’re done!”

— Edwidge Danticat

64. “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?”

— Edwidge Danticat

65. “In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality.”

— Edwidge Danticat

66. “My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It’s true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.”

— Edwidge Danticat

67. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

68. “We are not meant to be in this country. We did not want to come. We were forced to flee or die. Americans perceive desperate brown masses swarming at their golden shores, wildly inventing claims of persecution for the opportunity to flourish in this prosperous land. The view from beneath the bridge is somewhat different: reluctant refugees with an aching love of their forsaken homeland, of a homeland that has forsaken them, refugees who desire nothing more than to be home again.”

— Edwidge Danticat

69. “She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.”

— Edwidge Danticat

70. “This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.”

— Edwidge Danticat

71. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

72. “I think it’s hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

74. “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?”

— Edwidge Danticat

75. “We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or “We are all constantly cheating death.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

77. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

80. “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?”

— Edwidge Danticat

81. “I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.”

— Edwidge Danticat

82. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

83. “I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.”

— Edwidge Danticat

84. “They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?”

— Edwidge Danticat

85. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

86. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

87. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

88. “Once you’re involved in the work, it’s really just you and the characters and the words.”

— Edwidge Danticat

89. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

90. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

91. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

92. “She made sadness beautiful.”

— Edwidge Danticat

93. “There are loves that outlive lovers.”

— Edwidge Danticat

94. “You thought that if you didn’t tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.”

— Edwidge Danticat

95. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

97. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

100. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat