Quotes from Edwidge Danticat

I have always enjoyed cemeteries. Altars for the living as well as resting places for the dead, they are entryways, I think, to any town or city, the best places to become acquainted with the tastes of the inhabitants, both present and gone.

Our fatigue limited our desire to talk. Besides, each person's story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.

For so long this had been my life, but it was all in the past. Now we all had to try and find the future.

I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.

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.

We're all carrying our coffins with us every day." Or "We are all constantly cheating death.

Manman tells papa, you cannot let them kill somebody just because you are afraid. Papa says, oh yes, you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid. They are the law. It is their right.

There's a Haitian saying, "Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò." When you bathe other people's children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people's children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back.

Posing is death. I think when you make people pose for a photograph, you kill them.

At times I like it when he is just a deep echo, one utterance after another filling every crevice of the room, a voice that sounds like it's never been an infant's whimper, a boy's whisper, a young man's mumble, a voice that speaks as if every word it has ever uttered has always been and will always be for me.

There are loves that outlive lovers.

I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts…

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

What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't.

Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us" (Danticat 19).

I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

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.

She made sadness beautiful

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

If they come into a house and there is a son and a mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. They make the son sleeps with his mother. If it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing.

The soldiers can come and do with us what they want. That makes papa feel weak, she says. He gets angry when he feels weak.

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.

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.

In my sleep, I see my mother rising, like the mother spirit of the rivers, above the current that drowned her. She is wearing a dress of glass, fashioned out of the hardened clarity of the river, and this dress flows like raised dust behind her as she runs towards me and enfolds me in her smoke-light arms. Her face is like mine now, in fact it is the exact same long, three-different-shades-of-night face, and she is smiling a both-row-of-teeth revealing smile.