Edwidge Danticat Quotes
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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?
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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.
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Art is a luxury but also a necessity.
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Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.
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I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
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I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
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Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
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We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
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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.
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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.
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I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
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You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.
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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.
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So at least the people who have another voice and people who are interested in other things can have a place to put their information and be heard.