Edwidge Danticat

“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. (p154)

How do you even choose what to mend when so much has already been destroyed? How could she think, she asked herself, that she could revive or save anything? (p152)

he reminded himself of his own personal creed, that life was neither something you defended by hiding nor surrendered calmly on other people’s terms, but something you lived bravely, out in the open, and that if you had to lose it, you should also lose it on your own terms. (p201)

...she was like a starfish, that she constantly needed to have a piece of her break off and walk away in order for her to become something new. (p143)

remember that love is like kerosene. The more you have, the more you burn. (p199)

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. (p234)

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. ("Caroline's Wedding")

I wish I could've done more for her, but some sorrows were simply too individual to share. (p252)

"Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them." ("A Wall of Fire Rising")

"Do you see my granddaughter?...Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?" (chapter 14, p103)

'...She cannot stay out of duty. The things one does, one should do out of love.' (p155)

"I think it is very good that she has learned to read," I said. "It is her own freedom." (chapter 17 p118)