212 Quotes by Edwidge Danticat

People aren’t really aware of what’s happening in other places.

She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.

The past is like the hair on our head. I moved to New York when I was twelve, but you always have this feeling that wherever you come from, you physically leave it, but it doesn’t leave you.

In terms of the idea of long-term occupation – I have been reading a little bit more about this period – and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren’t aware of.

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.

I once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children’s inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.

I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I’m sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.

Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.

There was probably so much blood being shed in different parts of the country that morning, the blood of militiamen at the hands of former victims, the blood of former victims at the hands of militiamen battling for their lives. Maybe the water could be a cleansing offering to the gods on behalf of all the dead, no matter what their political leaning had been.