Edwidge Danticat Quotes

The true artform is being a human being.

The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we're a part.

One of the reasons I took up acting was to learn to be more human, to get in touch with human emotions.

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

We all must support the arts, as it is our culture. It makes us better people. It makes us happy; it gives us empathy and shows us how to live. It is so important.

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you're neglecting that, you're basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

I'm always looking for something that tells me a little bit about what it means to be human. That's how I measure the success of any artistic endeavor.

I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

To work on great material, what you really end up working on is yourself, your own humanity.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

Writing songs helped me figure out how to communicate with other people. I finally figured out that if I could express something in a song, I could probably express it in my real life, too.

Writing makes you more human.

Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness.

What I hope my writing reflects... is a sense of the connections between all human beings... and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

I am paid to dive deeper into my own humanity and do that with other people in collaboration... so that, in and of itself, I just feel like is the greatest privilege in the world.

I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.

I like stories about the world, where we're at. I like to explore humanity. I like to explore my own humanity.

The arts are so important not only to society but to ourselves as human beings. It keeps in touch with our own humanity. So access to the arts in any way, shape, or form is vital.

Every character, before they are heroes or villains, they are human beings.

I don't think music teaches about mundane, everyday life. It teaches us what it is to be a human being.