Quote

You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

Edwidge Danticat

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Live
Travel
Everything
City
Need
Birth
Centralized
Needs
Paper
Certificate
People
Outside
Certificates
Cities
Official
Become
Officials
Government
Sea

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

Image
I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, Cut their heads off, burn their houses.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
America's relationship with Haiti has always been very complicated. I often say to people, Before we came to America, America came to us in the form of the American occupation from 1915 to 1934.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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?
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
Edwidge Danticat