Edwidge Danticat Quotes

We left Germany when I was 11.

It's actually very hard when you're settled in one place to completely uproot yourself and go.

Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn't until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn't know any TV shows or music, which was even worse.

You have to move in life, but the loyalty you develop in a community is always remembered. But if you leave, you don't pick it up in the next town. It's not an add-on, you know, because you lose what you had.

My mother gave up everything for me. In Yekaterinburg, she had a job and an apartment in the centre of the city and her whole life. And in Moscow - nothing.

I was from somewhere else. Then all of a sudden I was here, in New York. With one suitcase.

Moving from Rome to Brussels was hard.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

The only other time I've been away from home was when I went to college. And that was just an hour away, so I could always go home if I needed to.

It was actually nice to get a fresh, clean slate when I came to America.

Why go somewhere else and start up all over again?

In 1975, I left the burning city of Beirut for the quiet insanity of England. To say that short, frail and wispy 15-year-old me didn't fit in would be such an understatement as to be a joke.

I've done a lot of things away from my homeland.

Even if you didn't come from another country, the idea of how do you make a home somewhere new is common to anyone who's either going to college, shifting towns.

Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.

We closed the restaurant in New Orleans and brought the entire staff to San Francisco. But we had to go home.

Leaving South Africa was very difficult.

During my youth, the idea of moving from Lebanon was unthinkable. Then I began to realise I might have to go, like my grandfather, uncles and others who left for America, Egypt, Australia, Cuba.

In 1969, we emigrated to Australia. It was a big change. The heat, the flies, and the completely different tinned meats. The shock was so great, I stopped reading books for nearly a year.

I've inherited a sense of that loss from my parents because it was so palpable all the time while I was growing up, the sense of what my parents had sacrificed in moving to the United States, and yet at the same time, building a life here and all that that entailed.

I am not with those who abandoned their land.

It's not a lighthearted decision to change your language, your country, your citizenship, and come to a world where you don't know anybody, to leave a place where you've had opportunities to build friendships from childhood. That's quite a big decision to make.

When you leave your country, it's hard to leave your family over there. My whole family is in Venezuela.

Leaving home early is always complicated. But when I arrived in Germany, I encountered an incredible structure built by the company that takes care of my career. They did not leave me wanting for anything. The most complicated thing was really the language. Otherwise, everything was taken care of.

When you go to a new country, you don't have the same facilities as you had in the one before. You adapt very quickly to the circumstances.