212 Quotes by Edwidge Danticat

We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that’s 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.

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.

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

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other” -Giselle.

I’m happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.

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.

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.

People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn’t true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.