Quotes from Edwidge Danticat

Then what do you want with me?'... 'The pursuit of happiness.

God grant us the courage to change those things we can, the serenity to accept the things we can't, and the wisdom to know the difference.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live," the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.

There was the stench of kerosene and burning tires wafting through the air. It was only a matter of time before the rubber smell would be replaced with that of flesh.

Freedom is a passing thing, a man said. Someone can always come and snatch it away.

We already have posterity, I said. When?' We were babies and we grew old

Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill," he wrote, "there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.

For in grief nothing 'stays put,"' C. S. Lewis writes. "One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?

From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she'd learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best to have everything out in the open.

They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong."— 'Breath, Eyes, Memory

I owe Oprah and that show a tremendous debt.

Taking turns, they exchanged tales quickly, the haste in their voices sometimes blurring the words, for greater than their desire to be heard was the hunger to tell. One could hear it in the fervor of the declarations, the obscenities shouted when something could not be remembered fast enough, when a stutter allowed another speaker to race into his account without the stutterer having completed his.

I am too easily swayed by every story I hear, or see, or witness, especially the tragic ones," she said. "I think this is going to be the story of my life. I'm going to be the girl who is too easily swayed by other people's stories.

I felt broken at the end of the meeting, but a little closer to being free.

You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.

His eyes surveyed all the familiar details of his fingers, pausing only for an instant when our pupils met and trying to communicate with the simple flutter of a smile all those things we could not say because there was the cane to curse, the harvest to dread, the future to fear.

Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all.

The only way to save them is to immediately sever them from the place where they are born. Otherwise they will always spend too much time chasing a shadow they can never reach… San manman, motherless, was the way you described someone who was lost, brutal and cruel. Fantom, ghost, was another. People without mothers, it was believed, were capable of anything.

From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she'd learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best to have everything out in the open.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness. —Peter Levine, The Unspoken Voice

First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you've heard about long-haul narrative. They're your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.

We cannot write about death without writing about life. Stories that start at the end of life often take us back to the past, to the beginning - or to some beginning - to unearth what there was before, what will be missed, what will be lost.

The roads to the city were covered with sharp pebbles only half buried in the thick dust. I chose to go barefoot, as my mother had always done on her visits to the Massacre River, the river separating Haiti from the Spanish-speaking country that she had never allowed me to name because I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living

the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages, even women like Manman who was accused of having wings of flame.