“No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.”
“I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there.”
“People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.”
“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.”
“These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.”
“All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.”
“You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.”
“They say behind mountains are more mountains.”
“All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, manman says, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.”
“. “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.”
“Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us” (Danticat 19).”
“Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.”
“You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.”
“We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old”
“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.”
“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so? Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls – which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”
“I hope you told him you were bitten by a gay spider.”
“Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation”
“I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.”
“This is me, Ana. All of me...and I'm all yours. What do I have to do to make you realize that? To make you see that I want you any way I can get you. That I love you.”
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