Quotes from Edwidge Danticat

People say that things like this happen in slow motion, as though you suddenly become an astronaut in the antigravity chamber of your own life. This wasn't true for me. Things were speeding up instead, and I did my best to slow them down in my mind.

Isabelle didn't need to call my name. Not because of the twin telepathy thing people always talk about, but because we were holding hands. We were holding hands the tightest we have ever held hands in our entire lives. We were holding hands just as we had on the day we were born.

May your love remain an eternal flame.

And they shared, as she put it, an impractical love.

You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.

Our faith is a mishmash of many things. We believe in family, in music and art, but we mostly believe in each other -Giselle

Maybe this is the beginning of madness . . . Forgive me for what I am saying. Read it . . . quietly, quietly. —OSIP MANDELSTAM

Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.

How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything?

This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.

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.

To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.

Your son is my friend,...He is my very terrible and imperfect and dear friend.

She remembers him once telling her that inside the Marie-Jeanne cave, sounds carry weight and travel in waves strong enough to possibly crack some of the most fragile karst. She imagines herself standing at the lowest depths of this cave, in the Abyss, and hearing again what he whispered in her ear during their wedding dance. One thing, MJ This is our one thing now.

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

That night, I slept hugging my secret.

Maybe we're all dying, one breath at a time.

Still, she heard herself say, "Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

There is a Haitian saying that might upset the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. 'Nou led, nou la,' it says. 'We are ugly, but we are here.' Like the modesty that is common in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or otherwise. For women like my grandmother, what is worth celebrating is the fact that we are here, that against all odds, we exist.

For those we don't see For those who are not here.

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.

we instinctively trust the banality and predictability of daily life. Until something larger shatters our world.

Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

No one will ever love you more than you love your pain," he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. She