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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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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Sometimes
Thing
Novels
People
Novel
Wonderful
Read
Lives
Persons
Person

More quotes by 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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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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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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Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.
Edwidge Danticat
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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.
Edwidge Danticat
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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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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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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 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
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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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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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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'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
Edwidge Danticat
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I see the sharp inequality between how Haitian and Cuban refugees are treated in Florida. Both groups come here because their lives are equally desperate. But on arrival, the Haitians are incarcerated, and some are immediately repatriated, whereas Cubans get to stay and are eligible for citizenship.
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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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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When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
Edwidge Danticat
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...women, brave as stars at dawn
Edwidge Danticat
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The way the media cycle works, the way the news works, and the way people's attention span works, is that we only learn that people exist when there is crisis.
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