Top 120 Edwidge Danticat Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Edwidge Danticat

103. “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

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

— Edwidge Danticat

105. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

106. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

107. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

108. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

109. “The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.”

— Edwidge Danticat

110. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

111. “Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.”

— Edwidge Danticat

112. “At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it’s never been an infant’s whimper, a boy’s whisper, a young man’s mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.”

— Edwidge Danticat

113. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

114. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

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

— Edwidge Danticat

116. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

117. “I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.”

— Edwidge Danticat

118. “Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.”

— Edwidge Danticat

119. “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.”

— Edwidge Danticat

120. “We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.”

— Edwidge Danticat

121. “May your love remain an eternal flame.”

— Edwidge Danticat

122. “And they shared, as she put it, an impractical love.”

— Edwidge Danticat

123. “God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can’t, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

— Edwidge Danticat

124. “Maybe we’re all dying, one breath at a time.”

— Edwidge Danticat

125. “She said the lottery was like love. Providence was not with her, but she was patient.”

— Edwidge Danticat

126. “Your son is my friend,“... “He is my very terrible and imperfect and dear friend.”

— Edwidge Danticat

127. “I felt broken at the end of the meeting, but a little closer to being free.”

— Edwidge Danticat

128. “I didn’t feel guilty about burning my mother’s name anymore. I knew my hurt and hers were links in a long chain and if she hurt me, it was because she was hurt, too.”

— Edwidge Danticat

129. “Still, she heard herself say, “Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.”

— Edwidge Danticat

130. “She remembers him once telling her that inside the Marie-Jeanne cave, sounds carry weight and travel in waves strong enough to possibly crack some of the most fragile karst. She imagines herself standing at the lowest depths of this cave, in the Abyss, and hearing again what he whispered in her ear during their wedding dance. One thing, MJ This is our one thing now.”

— Edwidge Danticat