{"author":"Edwidge Danticat","author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat","total_quotes":17,"quotes":[{"text":"Those who die young, they are cheated,” she said. “Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["bones","death","home","move","return","young"],"id":410,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["death","matrilineage","women"],"id":1342,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"These were our bedtime stories. Tales that haunted our parents and made them laugh at the same time. We never understood them until we were fully grown and they became our sole inheritance.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["oral-tradition","stories","storytelling"],"id":3047,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["historical-fiction"],"id":32828,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"I began my effort at improving my flight experiences by reading purposefully during my flights. My airplane reading would often be centered on themes. On some flights I would read only newspapers and magazines, catching up on one particular event. On other flights I would read a short novel, and finishing the entire book during the flight would give me a great thrill, as if I'd just flown a cross-Atlantic mission with Amelia Earhart.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["reading","travel"],"id":48245,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"...Women, brave as stars at dawn.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["feminist","inspirational"],"id":56474,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["hope"],"id":78886,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as dangerously as our forebears—though we are not risking torture, beatings, execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence— still, while we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere. People are buried under rubble somewhere. Mass graves are being dug somewhere. Survivors are living in makeshift tent cities and refugee camps somewhere, shielding their heads from the rain, closing their eyes, covering their ears, to shut out the sounds of military “aid” helicopters. And still, many are reading, and writing, quietly, quietly.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["artist","immigrant"],"id":91172,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["dominican-republic","haiti","quisqueya","women","writing"],"id":152087,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"},{"text":"Perhaps there had been joy for them in finding that sugar could be made from blood.","author":"Edwidge Danticat","tags":["blood","joy","sad-but-true","sugar"],"id":199715,"author_id":"Edwidge+Danticat"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}