Brother, I'm Dying Quotes

“It's not easy to start over in a new place,' he said. 'Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“There’s a Haitian saying, “Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò.” When you bathe other people’s children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people’s children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“Maybe we're all dying, one breath at a time.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can’t.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a gravesite and a tombstone in Queens, New York,after living apart for more than thirty years.In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beauséjour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one
another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills, “Kote w ye frè m?” Brother, where are you? And the other one quickly answers, “Mwen la. Right here, brother. I’mright here.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“They didn’t just take your things. They took your legs. They took your heart. You could have walked out of Man Jou’s house alone and dropped dead from the shock of seeing the few people who did not want to kill you.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“His entire life was now reduced to an odd curiosity, a looting opportunity.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“He did not dare look back toward the church as a new wave of looters brushed past him, heading there. He might have been tempted to follow them, to try to stop them, reason with them. He thought about all the wounded who might be lying somewhere dying. He thought of their mothers, fathers, standing over them unable to do anything but watch. The country was once again losing a generation of young people, some violent, some bystanders, but all in the line of fire, dying”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“Suddenly he understood the true workings of
a mob, one infuriated body morphing into another until they all became limbs to one raging monster.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“The din of clanking metal rose above the racket of roof-denting rocks. Or maybe he only thought so because he was so heartened by the bat tenèb. Maybe he wouldn’t die today after all. Maybe none of them would die, because their neighbors were making their presence known, demanding peace from the gangs as well as from the authorities, from all sides.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“I realized that afternoon that for nearly a year, while my mother, brothers and I had constantly carried food up to my father, we had rarely eaten with him. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that he missed sharing a table or aplate, passing a spice or a spoon. But he did. Just as he missed seeing certain faces and places and hearing certain voices that neither his friends nor family nor the television could successfully transport to his room”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“When the rice was done, my mother searched a cabinet filled with her special-occasion dishes, the kind she used only when she had company, and pulled out a white porcelain plate with two giant cherries sketched in themiddle. The cherries overlapped in a way that made them look like one large heart and as my mother heaped the rice on top of them, they seemed like a coded message from a woman who was beyond taking ordinary moments with her husband for granted.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“Looking into my daughter’s eyes, I thought of my mother, who had faced these first hours alone after I was born. She had been made no promises, been offered no guarantees that either she or I would even live past that night. If something had been ruptured inside of her, no one would have noticed. If something had been broken inside of newborn me, perhaps no one but my mother would have cared. My daughter’s quiet yet well-monitored first night was perhaps the one my mother had dreamed for me, for herself, a dream of kind words, kisses, flowers.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“He shouldn’t be here,” my father said, tearful and breathlessly agitated, shortly before drifting off to sleep that night. “If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying

“These men(there were very few women among these forces), and everyone else who wore a uniform, wielded a baton and carried a gun, inspired both awe and fear in Maxo and my uncle, for they were part of a constant pull and release, or what my uncle might have in Creole called “mòde soufle,”where those who are most able to obliterate you are also the only ones
offering some illusion of shelter and protection, a shred of hope—even if false—for possible restoration.”
― Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying