The Best American Essays 2011 Quotes

“I'm not usually sold on epiphanies. I am more interested in the opposite experience: not those rare moments of startling insight or realization, but-what I suspect are more common-those sudden flashes of anxious confusion and bewilderment.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2011

“we instinctively trust the banality and predictability of daily life. Until something larger shatters our world.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness. —Peter Levine, The Unspoken Voice”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“Whenever there is someone in a family who has long been ill, and hopelessly ill,” he wrote, “there come painful moments when all timidly, secretly, at the bottom of their hearts long for his death.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” the novelist and essayist Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves stories in order not to die.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“When we insert our “I” (our eye) to search deeper into someone, something, or ourselves, we are always risking a yawn or a slap, indifference or disdain. How do we even know that what interests or delights us, alarms or terrifies us, will invoke a raised eyebrow in someone else? Perhaps the craft, the art, in whatever form it takes, is our bridge. We are narrating, after all (as my father was), slivers of moments, fragments of lives, declaring our love and hatred, concerns, and ambivalence, outing our hidden selves, and hoping that what we say will make sense to others.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“Even by the end of the last century, the average human being in a country such as ours saw as many images in a day as a Victorian inhaled in a lifetime.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011

“Medicare rewards doctors far better for doing procedures than for assessing whether they should be done at all.”
― Edwidge Danticat, The Best American Essays 2011