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We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

Edwidge Danticat

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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Good
Fully
Wouldn
Literature
Human
Humans
Without
Need
Needs

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
Edwidge Danticat
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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
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Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
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
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It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
Edwidge Danticat
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In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Edwidge Danticat
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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
Edwidge Danticat
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Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
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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I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
Edwidge Danticat
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We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
Edwidge Danticat
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Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.
Edwidge Danticat
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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?
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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No one will love you more than you love your pain.
Edwidge Danticat
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I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
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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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.
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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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