Edwidge Danticat Quotes
-
It seemed from the media that we were being told that all Haitians had AIDS. At the time, I had just come from Haiti. I was twelve years old, and the building I was living in had primarily Haitians. A lot of people got fired from their jobs. At school, sometimes in gym class, we'd be separated because teachers were worried about what would happen if we bled. So there was really this intense discrimination.
-
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?
-
The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.
-
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 think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
-
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?
-
There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."
-
To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
-
People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
-
I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.
-
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.
-
People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.
-
Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
-
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.
-
Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.
-
It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.