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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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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Interesting
Didn
Writing
Things
People
Overcome
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More quotes by Edwidge Danticat
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
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
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
Edwidge Danticat
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
I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.
Edwidge Danticat
When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
Edwidge Danticat
Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
Edwidge Danticat
That has always been a strength of Haiti: Beyond crisis, it has beautiful art it has beautiful music. But people have not heard about those as much as they heard about the coups and so forth. I always hope that the people who read me will want to learn more about Haiti.
Edwidge Danticat
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
It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
Edwidge Danticat
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.
Edwidge Danticat
We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
Edwidge Danticat
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
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
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
Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.
Edwidge Danticat
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
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
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
In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
Edwidge Danticat