Quote

I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.

Edwidge Danticat

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edwidge Danticat
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: January 19
Author
Novelist
Writer
Port au Prince
Nature
Writing
Melancholy
Gets

More quotes by Edwidge Danticat

Image
When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
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
Image
And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No one will love you more than you love your pain.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
I don't know what will happen to the physical book and what it will mean for authors. I worry whether it will mean people can still make their careers this way. Will whatever comes next allow people to be able to own their ideas and be able to take time to develop them?
Edwidge Danticat
Image
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
Image
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