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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

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Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Writing
Therapy
Tool
Corner
Corners
Tools
Struggle
Also
Fold
Able
Folds

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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 am very timid about speaking for the collective. I can say what I see, I can say what I've heard, I can say what I feel, but I can't speak for - no one can speak for - 10 million people, and it takes away something from them if you make yourself their voice.
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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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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I think all artists are looking for a subject or are sometimes unsure of their subject, but immigrant artists bring another culture to that and they bring also the place where the original culture meets the new culture.
Edwidge Danticat
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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.
Edwidge Danticat
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People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.
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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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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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