Edwidge Danticat Quotes

I think Roland read 'Primal Scream' first and then gave it to me. This was, I think, even prior to 'The Graduate' days. We both got heavily into and it offered a lot of questions about how screwed up our home life was.

I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

I've certainly been someone who has loved to mine the trials and tribulations of growing up in general, and the people who are in our lives, and I don't mind pulling from them and writing things down on my phone that my family says.

I've been working in Haiti 28 years - I thought I'd sort of seen it... I've gone through a number of coups, the storms of 2008, I thought, you know, that I'd seen things as bad as they were going to get, and I was wrong.

I am currently in Haiti to help the Haitian people in their reconstruction.

Whenever an earthquake or tsunami takes thousands of innocent lives, a shocked world talks of little else. I'll never forget the wrenching days I spent in Haiti last year for Save the Children just weeks after the earthquake.

When I went back to visit my native Berlin after World War II, I noticed that the only thing I really remembered from my childhood Berlin days is the shoe store.

I actually happened to be in Haiti right before the earthquake in 2010. I was there already with the organization I work with now, Artists for Peace and Justice, visiting the primary school that I had adopted, the Academy for Peace and Justice in Port-au-Prince. I came back, and within days, the earthquake happened.

I was 15 when my family moved to Jidda from Britain in 1982. Living in Saudi Arabia was such a shock to my system that I like to say I was traumatized into feminism.

My family and I survived Hurricane Katrina in 2005; we left my grandmother's flooding house, were refused shelter by a white family, and took refuge in trucks in an open field during a Category Five hurricane. I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive.

I'm just one generation between someone who cheered when Germans were burning and someone who doesn't even know that there is a border. That's a miracle - really is a miracle - and it gets me really emotional.

I had four combat tours, and I never saw death on a scale like I saw in Haiti. A quarter-million people lost their lives.

The Khmer Rouge tried to delete everything. They tried to erase our past, our personality, our land, our sentiment. What we tried to do in 'The Missing Picture' was to reconstruct our identity, to bring it back to the people through cinema.

Someday, I'll write a book about what I've been through.

My family, my background... it just parallels really nicely with a lot of social and cultural movements.

Every piece of writing I've done has been something where I feel like I need to get this out of me, whether it's a seed of something personal or an anxiety that turns into a play or an image that's in my mind and haunts me that I'm trying to investigate.

Well, there's Katrina, but you can go through lots of Kurdistan and it looks like Katrina was just there but there's people living in it.

As a young victim of bullying and then, later, a vindictive perpetrator of violence myself, I've known both sides of this experience, and I tried very hard in the writing here to be as absolutely honest as I possibly could, to not romanticize myself or my past actions or cowardly inactions in any way.

When people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over, and you're strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can't handle it.

I think any music of any worth has been done by people who were very interested in the internal process of their soul and their mind that's taking place while they're writing music.

I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.

After the tsunami in Japan, we were open for business. In fact, I flew there 10 days after the tsunami to show our support for the Japanese people.

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.