212 Quotes by Edwidge Danticat

It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.

The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.

For the majority of the people it is a difficult place to live. That's a reality that we can't ignore. But there is also great beauty to it.

The justification - the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people's destiny - is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don't see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn't disappear for the people who have to live under occupation - and their children and their children's children.

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

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there.

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.