Edwidge Danticat Quotes

People don't know my real self, and they're not about to find out.

Ever since we weare cloathes, we know not one another.

I am a person who is trained to look other people in the eye. But I can't look into the eyes of everyone who wants to look into mine; I can't emotionally cope with that kind of volume. Sunglasses are part of my armor.

Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.

I'm more insecure than I ever let anyone know; sometimes you protect yourself with this kind of armor that people see more than they see you.

Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.

I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing.

I don't see my movies. I think it's healthier and safer to keep a bit of distance. I'm afraid to be disappointed.

I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man. But all I'm doing is trying to protect myself and my work.

I'm not an intimate person, really.

I find it really hard to be close to anybody.

I stay standoffish in a sense, in my own personal space, to be able to cope with whatever it is you've got to cope with.

People choose to shut themselves off and build a load of defense mechanisms and not let anybody in because it's easier that way. You don't get hurt, and there's less risk involved if you build this hard shell.

I've never been one to just let everyone see what I'm about, so sometimes there is a misperception.

I don't want people to know everything about me.

They can't tell so much about you if you got your eyes closed.

Because of that she had never had enough energy to be herself, a person who, like everyone else in the world, needed other people in order to be happy. But other people were so difficult. They reacted in unpredictable ways, they surrounded themselves with defensive walls, they behaved just as she did, pretending they didn't care about anything. When someone more open to life appeared, they either rejected them outright or made them suffer, consigning them to being inferior, ingenuous.

It's just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.

You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.

I have to be a little bit guarded, because I can be very open and I like to include people, but then again I have to remind myself to be careful.

I took off my glasses while you were yelling at me once more than once so as not to see you see me react. Should've put 'em, should've put 'em on again so I could see you see me sincerely yelling back.

Our barriers to love are rarely consciously chosen. They are our efforts to protect the places where the heart is bruised.

More and more do I feel, as I advance in life, how little we really know of each other. Friendship seems to me like the touch of musical-glasses--it is only contact; but the glasses themselves, and their contents, remain quite distinct and unmingled.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.