“Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. 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. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“...women, brave as stars at dawn”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?"
My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.
Now," she said, "you will know how to answer.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“The girl she said, I didn’t tell you this because it was a small thing, but little girls, they leave their hearts at home when they walk outside. Hearts are so precious. They don’t want to lose them.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“They are the people of creation. Their maker…gives them the sky to carry because they are so strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“Tante Atie once said that love is like rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you’re not careful it will drown you.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“That night, I slept hugging my secret.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“Then what do you want with me?'...
'The pursuit of happiness.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
“She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Breath, Eyes, Memory
Edwidge Danticat
Born place: in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Born date January 19, 1969
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“The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi
ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.
The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.”
― Andrea Dworkin, quote from Right Wing Women
“Si tu ne m'aimes pas, je t'aime
si je t'aime, prends garde à toi!”
― Prosper Mérimée, quote from Carmen
“I was thinking about the cow thing. About how hanging on to an ex-boyfriend is like chewing your cud until somebody drops a fresh bale of hay in front of you. Or something like that.”
― Dandi Daley Mackall, quote from My Boyfriends' Dogs: The Tales of Adam and Eve and Shirley
“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music—the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, and interesting people. Forget yourself.” When we “forget ourselves,” it is easy to write. We are not standing there, stiff as a soldier, our entire ego shimmied into every capital “I.” When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else—the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well—we certainly write more easily.”
― Julia Cameron, quote from The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life
“There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.”
― Sam Shepard, quote from True West
Before I Wake
The Grand Sophy
Prisoner of Night an...
The Time in Between
Ink and Bone
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