Edwidge Danticat Quotes

• People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope

• The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Women

• You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Government, Birth, Certificate

• To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Haitians, Independence

• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Peoples, Consciousness

•  

  That’s whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through – whenever they are in the news, that’s when they exist. If you don’t see them they don’t exist.

   

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Political, Process

• Someone has said that nations have interests, they don’t have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in United States, Policy

•  

  People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.

   

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Alternative, Information

•  

  People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don’t think that’s limited to Haiti.

   

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Country

  Tags in People, Thinking

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

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Awareness

• Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Florida, Hope

• On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Basic, Things, Feeling

• On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way.

  Edwidge Danticat

•  

  Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.

   

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Haiti, Revolution

• More and more people are able to access information – thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Access, Information, Internet

• 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.

  Edwidge Danticat

• In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Haiti, Support, United States

• In fact that is the struggle that most Americans – As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in American, Struggle, World

• I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Extraordinary, Dreams

• I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.

  Edwidge Danticat

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Self, Think, Haiti

Edwidge Danticat (25)

Birth:	19th January, 1969
Nationality:	American, Haitian
Profession:	Author, Essayist, Novelist

About

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She is a Haitian-American author, essayist, and novelist. She is an award-winning author of 'Breath, Eyes, Memory,' 'Krik? Krak!' and 'The Dew Breaker,' among others. She received a BA in French literature and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Brown University in 1993. Since completing her MFA, she has taught creative writing at the New York University and the University of Miami.

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Deaths

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