We try to keep the beautiful memories, but other things from the past creep up on us.

I think it's hard to write a book about happiness because fiction requires tension and complication.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

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 lose it on your own terms.

Wonderful thing about novels is that sometimes we read a novel and we know the person in the novel more than we know people in our own lives.

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 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