“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“They say behind mountains are more mountains.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“. “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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us” (Danticat 19).”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, quote from Krik? Krak!
Edwidge Danticat
Born place: in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
Born date January 19, 1969
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“No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.”
― W.G. Sebald, quote from Austerlitz (Penguin Essentials)
“I felt like I was faking all of this, like I was playing the part of a student. I had the costume and the props, but I didn't really belong here. I'd pinned notes on the stupid corkboard backing of my desk, and I'd highlighted things...But it was all so meaningless.
For about an hour, I had an overwheling urge to grab my bag, stuff in a few things, and take the next train to Bristol. I could be back on my parents' couch that night if I got moving. I could admit that I wasn't ready for this, that the semester was a wash. My parents would be thrilled, I was sure. Not about the semester being a wash--but certainly about having me back where they could keep me safe and sound. It would be so easy to do it. The very idea made me warm inside. It was okay to give up. I'd been brave. Everyone would say so.
And yet...even as I opened a dresser drawer and figured out which things I would take with me in this hypothetical scenario, i remembered the problem.
There would still be ghosts
i would still have a future.
I would still go back to school eventually. You can't curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was i going to go all fetal position, or was I going to woman up?”
― Maureen Johnson, quote from The Madness Underneath
“What kills a relationship between two people is precisely the lack of challenge, the feeling that nothing is new anymore. We need to continue to be a surprise for each other.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Adultery
“He points out that one of the really tough things is figuring out what questions to ask,” Musk said. “Once you figure out the question, then the answer is relatively easy. I came to the conclusion that really we should aspire to increase the scope and scale of human consciousness in order to better understand what questions to ask.” The teenage Musk then arrived at his ultralogical mission statement. “The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment,” he said.”
― Ashlee Vance, quote from Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
“A wise man who cultivates wisdom may sometimes drown in it.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, quote from Taiko: An Epic Novel of War and Glory in Feudal Japan
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Dear Life
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The Adventures of Ch...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
