Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Anger is a wasted emotion.
...women, brave as stars at dawn
Art is a luxury but also a necessity.
They say behind mountains are more mountains.
I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.
It is the calm and silent waters that drown you.
No one will love you more than you love your pain.
The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.
The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
People aren't really aware of what's happening in other places.
To be able to create you have to have peace of mind on some level.
I think daily that the country's future is being thrown to the wind.
I'm just melancholy by nature, and a lot of that gets into my writing.
People who want alternative information have to try so hard to find it.
Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”
Vodou is one of the religions practiced in Haiti, a rich religion for the people.
We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.
Once you're involved in the work, it's really just you and the characters and the words.
To start with, for example this year, 2004, is the bicentennial of Haitian independence.
And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.
Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.
In Haiti you had the Duvaliers for 29 years and they were very well supported by the United States.
I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.
I'm happy to be part of this chorus of people who are trying to tell more complex stories about Haiti.
Life's hard in Haiti right now. And the hardest thing is that the future does not lie with one person.
Being a shy child, I always longed for a mask. Even in my adult life, I have glasses, they are my mask.
When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you're done!
It's interesting to see people overcome things. Because if you didn't overcome, you wouldn't be writing it.
If a woman is worth remembering,' said my grandmother, 'there is no need to have her name carved in letters.
I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.
Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
Someone has said that nations have interests, they don't have friends, and you see that over and over in U.S. policy.
There [Haiti] were also leaders like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, whose motto was, "Cut their heads off, burn their houses."
You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.
I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.
Love is like the rain. It comes in a drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you're not careful it will drown you.
When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.
People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.
We live now in a global culture where anything that happens in a place that's 90 minutes from your shores really affects you.
People often think of Haiti as a place where you're not supposed to have any joy. I wanted to show that this is a place with joy.
I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."
We've had fiction from the time of cave drawings. I think fiction, storytelling, and narrative in general will always exist in some form.
People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don't think that's limited to Haiti.
I think it is important to reach people through arts and literature, because then you establish a connection that's not an instant crisis.
For the majority of the people it is a difficult place to live. That's a reality that we can't ignore. But there is also great beauty to it.
All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.
Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.
There is something human about the way people react to and identify with suffering. There's a lot more empathy in the world than we perhaps realize.