Quote

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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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Names
Woman
Remember
Carved
Need
Remembering
Needs
Grandmother
Letters
Worth
Name

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.
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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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I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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I am very timid about speaking for the collective. I can say what I see, I can say what I've heard, I can say what I feel, but I can't speak for - no one can speak for - 10 million people, and it takes away something from them if you make yourself their voice.
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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.
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We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
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It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
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The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
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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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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
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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
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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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It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
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In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
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Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
Edwidge Danticat