212 Quotes by Edwidge Danticat

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.

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

I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn’t in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me.

My models were oral, were storytellers. Like my grandmothers and my aunts. It’s true, a lot of people in my life were not literate in a formal sense, but they were storytellers. So I had this experience of just watching somebody spin a tale off the top of her head. I loved that.

We are all bodies, but the dying body starts decaying right before our eyes. And those narratives that tell us what it’s like to live, and die, inside those bodies are helpful to all of us, because no matter how old we are, our bodies never stop being mysterious to us.

May your love remain an eternal flame.

My mother used to say that we’ll all have three death: the one when our breath leaves our bodies to rejoin the air, the one when we are out back in the earth, and the one that will erase us completely and no one will remember us at all.

They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.

Even when I think of writing fiction, it’s being kind of a liar, a storyteller, a weaver, and there’s that sense of how much of this is your life. The story is a way you unravel your life from behind a mask.