Edwidge Danticat

“I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.”

“To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.”

“You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.”

“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.”

“People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti.”

“I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.”

“I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.”

“On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away.”

“Those who die young, they are cheated,” she said. “Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?”

“People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.”

“In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.”

“I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.”

“Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now.”

“Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed.”