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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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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Disappears
Frustration
Disappear
Streets
Consciousness
Moments
Country
Coup
People
Coups

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.
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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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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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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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We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
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No one will love you more than you love your pain.
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To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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Even when I think of writing fiction, it's being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there's that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.
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
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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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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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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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We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
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.
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I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
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