Krik? Krak! Quotes

“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves. I look up at the sky and I see you there.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“People are just too hopeful, and sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us. People will believe anything.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“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.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“The women in your family have never lost touch with one another. Death is a path we take to meet on the other side.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“They say behind mountains are more mountains.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“All anyone can hope for is just a tiny bit of love, manman says, like a drop in a cup if you can get it, or a waterfall, a flood, if you can get that too.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“. “Manman tells papa, you cannot let them kill somebody just because you are afraid. Papa says, oh yes, you can let them kill somebody because you are afraid. They are the law. It is their right.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“They say the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I have never been given very much. What was there to take away?”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“Sometimes hope is the biggest weapon of all to use against us” (Danticat 19).”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“They say a girl becomes a woman when she loses her mother. You, child, were born a woman.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it? Because of course, once you remember, you always stop looking.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“The soldiers can come and do with us what they want. That makes papa feel weak, she says. He gets angry when he feels weak.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“If they come into a house and there is a son and a mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. They make the son sleeps with his mother. If it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“This is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“You thought that if you didn't tell the stories, the sky would fall on your head.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“All of these women were here for the same reason. They were said to have been seen at night rising from the ground like birds on fire. A loved one, a friend, or a neighbor had accused them of causing the death of a child. A few other people agreeing with these stories was all that was needed to have them arrested. And sometimes even killed.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages, even women like Manman who was accused of having wings of flame.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“The roads to the city were covered with sharp pebbles only half buried in the thick dust. I chose to go barefoot, as my mother had always done on her visits to the Massacre River, the river separating Haiti from the Spanish-speaking country that she had never allowed me to name because I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“They treat Haitians like dogs in the Bahamas, a woman says. To them, we are not human. Even though their music sounds like ours. Their people look like ours. Even though we had the same African fathers who probably crossed these same seas together.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“Nineteen Thirty-Seven”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!

“We already have posterity," I said.
"When?'
"We were babies and we grew old”
― Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak!