When you are working on something, you have to believe that people will still be reading when you’re done!
Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head. -pg. 25.
I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people’s hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, “I don’t know.”
It’s hard to tell what people will do with the word and how they’ll be circulating it but I think the storytellers and the stories themselves will always be there.
Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up – with that heroic Delta force – people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment.
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.
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.
I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it.
Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.
For the majority of the people it is a difficult place to live. That’s a reality that we can’t ignore. But there is also great beauty to it.
You learned in school that you have pencils and paper only because the trees gave themselves in unconditional sacrifice.
You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.
I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.
They say behind mountains are more mountains.
We need literature because we wouldn’t fully know ourselves without it. We need good literature to be fully human.
No one will love you more than you love your pain.
People aren’t really aware of what’s happening in other places.
People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. I don’t think that’s limited to Haiti.
In terms of the idea of long-term occupation – I have been reading a little bit more about this period – and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren’t aware of.
I hope to be a good role model for my daughters.