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 More Quotes by Edwidge Danticat More Quotes From Edwidge Danticat 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. Edwidge Danticat cnn country thinking People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it. Edwidge Danticat alternatives trying people To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence. Edwidge Danticat independence example years That's whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through - whenever they are in the news, that's when they exist. If you don't see them they don't exist. Edwidge Danticat news political country I was neither doing these people nor myself a favor by showing up when my heart wasn't in it. There were not getting the real me, the whole me, the true me. Edwidge Danticat real heart people They say behind mountains are more mountains. Edwidge Danticat mountain behinds More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago. Edwidge Danticat thank-you people years 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. Edwidge Danticat government sea travel No one will love you more than you love your pain. Edwidge Danticat love-you-more pain love-you You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice. Edwidge Danticat sacrifice tree school Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars. Edwidge Danticat stars moon sky I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to Edwidge Danticat daughter memories children Jephthah called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, 'Let me cross over,' the men of Gilead asked him, 'Are you an Ephraimite?' If he replied, 'No,' they said, 'All right, say Shibboleth.' If he said, 'Sibboleth,' because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Fourty-thousand were killed at the time. Edwidge Danticat jordan together men There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness. Edwidge Danticat frustration country people Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money. Edwidge Danticat army fighting america If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters. Edwidge Danticat grandmother names needs Anger is a wasted emotion. Edwidge Danticat emotion 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 dark hair writing On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way. Edwidge Danticat sometimes people way world In fact that is the struggle that most Americans - As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way. Edwidge Danticat rich struggle way world
