212 Quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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.

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.”

No, women like you don’t write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

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?

There’s no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material.

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.

They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?

The people did not elect me. I speak with one voice that may echo other people, but I am part of a group of people. That’s not distancing yourself from a community, that’s also allowing the space for others to speak for themselves.

If a woman is worth remembering,′ said my grandmother, ’there is no need to have her name carved in letters.