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Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat Quotes

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“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?”

“I sometimes feel as though we are all daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.”