Quote

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

Edwidge Danticat

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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Back
Behind
Come
Stay
Greet
Start
Family
Exile
Everyone
Receive
Easy
Letters
Place
Members
Someone
Behinds

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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I can't wait for both my daughters to be old enough to read all my books. I loved it every time I saw my parents acting like more than just my parents. And I'm looking forward to that with my daughters too. I am looking forward to having them discover me as someone completely other than their mother.
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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?
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Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
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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
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When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.
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When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
Edwidge Danticat
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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.
Edwidge Danticat
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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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Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
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There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, Cut their heads off, burn their houses.
Edwidge Danticat
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If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
Edwidge Danticat
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Language is such a powerful thing. After the earthquake, I went to Haiti and people were talking about how [they] described this feeling of going through an earthquake. People really didn't have the vocabulary - before we had hurricanes. I'd talk with people and they'd say, We have to name it it has to have a name.
Edwidge Danticat
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Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.
Edwidge Danticat
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No one will love you more than you love your pain.
Edwidge Danticat
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And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
Edwidge Danticat
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Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.
Edwidge Danticat
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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.
Edwidge Danticat
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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.
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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
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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.
Edwidge Danticat