Edwidge Danticat Quotes

America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

People in Finland have also adopted me because of my dad, and that's great, but it's the one language I can't speak.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

I think it's important to be sincere. And I could be the most sincere just staying in [my] mother language actually. And that's the reason why I stay composing and writing in French.

My parents left Iran in 1979 and moved to France and then moved to the U.S. My brother was born in France and I was born in New York. I think my parents left France because they felt their kids would never be accepted by French culture. Here they thought we could feel American - that we could feel safe in that way - which was important to them, given what their experiences were in Iran. They used to joke about how I could be president because I was the only one born in America.

Here I am, a Palestinian Arab who only knows how to write in Hebrew, stuck in central Illinois.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

I certainly know German colleagues in the U.S. who try to be Americans, try to melt into Americanism, even before they get married and become American citizens. But I've never tried that.

A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of 'border,' and that is what I have experienced.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

I often say to my friends that I felt too Puerto Rican to live in the States; then I felt too American to live in Puerto Rico. So when I settled back in Puerto Rico in 1992, I had to come to terms with all of that.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

I'm an immigrant, and I think being an outsider in your home is something that I really relate to.

Neither of my parents had English as a first language.

I was actually born and raised in Puerto Rico. I moved to the States when I was 19. I was very impressed early on by being around people who spoke my language and ate the same food and listened to the same music, dressed the same. But then you look around and, you know, you're not in Puerto Rico.

For immigrant families, television is what connects you to American culture, but it's also what makes you feel like an outsider.

Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimately, to maintain your sense of specialness and difference? And how do you express that? Does it just become a kind of kitsch? You can say this of gay people, but it's true for Jewish people, Italian Americans, everyone who deals with it. It's a question of assimilation. How can you be assimilated and special at the same time?

I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless.

I think I went through early years of my career sort of thinking, "Well, maybe I'm just not British enough." And I always remember my father saying to me, "Don't think you're English, because however English you feel, some Englishman is going to remind you that you're not." Now, for him it must have been a much more acute experience, because he immigrated to England. I was born there, so I kind of felt I had the right to assume that I was British, but it's true. The English are a very warm and welcoming people, but there's a streak in there that reminds you, occasionally.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)

We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders.