That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires-risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art. You must be able to dream something nearly impossible and toil to bring it into existence.

Edwidge Danticat

Categorized in : Art Dream Block

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

pouring rain love-is

Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.

Edwidge Danticat

thumbprints misery black

Life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people's terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should lose it on your own terms.

Edwidge Danticat

hiding should people

Write what haunts you. What keeps you up at night. What you are unable to get out of your mind. Sometimes they are the hardest things to write, but those are often the things that are worth investigating by you specifically. . .

Edwidge Danticat

monday writing night

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

Edwidge Danticat

knowing writing people

When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!

Edwidge Danticat

reading believe people

There is this split between the Haiti of before the earthquake and the Haiti of after the earthquake. So when I'm writing anything set in Haiti now, whether fiction or nonfiction, always in the back of my mind is how people, including some of my own family members, have been affected not just by history and by the present but also by the earthquake.

Edwidge Danticat

mind writing people

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

Edwidge Danticat

unity hair writing

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

Edwidge Danticat

views people thinking

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. -pg. 25

Edwidge Danticat

strong sky people

It's not a matter of whether the reviews of your books are good or bad, it's about being taken seriously, both as a woman writer and as a writer of color. Also, it worries me when people point to a couple of women writers or writers of color who get some attention - and I am sometimes pulled into that category - to prove that others are getting a fair shot. It's like those people who keep saying that racism no longer exists in this country because Barack Obama was a President of the United States.

Edwidge Danticat

couple country book

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

Edwidge Danticat

struggle writing way

We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.

Edwidge Danticat

humans literature needs

It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.

Edwidge Danticat

starting-over easy letters

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

girl home heart

Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.

Edwidge Danticat

miracle believe

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

Edwidge Danticat

hopeful believe people

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.

Edwidge Danticat

knowing people thinking

I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.

Edwidge Danticat

people art thinking

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

names sea sky