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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

Edwidge Danticat

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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Years
Bicentennial
Haitian
Independence
Example
Year
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More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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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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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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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.
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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People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
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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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.
Edwidge Danticat
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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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It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
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.
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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And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
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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Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
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.
Edwidge Danticat
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Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .
Edwidge Danticat
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I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.
Edwidge Danticat
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I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to
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