Chris Abani Quotes
Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
Quotes to Explore
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After leaving school, I travelled around Europe for about six months. In Denmark, I thought that was my chance to get an amazing haircut, so I went to what I thought was a great hairdresser. It turned out to be the car wash of hairdressers, and I walked out sporting yet another pudding bowl, but this time with a stripe bleached down the centre.
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I stayed in the astronaut program until 1993. People ask me why I left. I thought I had a lot of things to contribute that would be difficult to do if I stayed. I thought I could have a stronger voice as an advocate for space exploration. So I ended up starting my own technology consulting company.
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You can take things that Jimi Hendrix took, from Curtis Mayfield or from Buddy Guy for example, because we are all children of everything, even Picasso. But if you want to stand out, you have to learn to crystallize your existence and create your own fingerprints.
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As far as religion goes, I feel like everyone should have their own one-on-one with God.
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Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
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Chinese people age overnight.
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I gave up on the delusion that these players enjoy soccer as much as I do, that they play for the love of the game.
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In the process of evolution, the body lasts for some time and then will take other body and take other body and take other body until the final redemption from diversity is transcended.
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Therefore, you are not training young people for the world of today and the world of tomorrow unless you are doing proven technology training. That is one of the reasons I'm so concerned.
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Win or lose, we go shopping after the election.
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Your ability to shape your future depends on how well you communicate where you want to be when you get there. When ideas are communicated effectively, people follow and change.
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The West has become the world model; developing countries are dreaming of living like us, which is impossible. They should reject our model, because it is not sustainable. Developing countries should even give us the example, but unfortunately that's not what happens.
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We develop our propensity to forgive or not to forgive by what we see illustrated at the early ages of our development.
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War is over if you want it.
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The blessing of being able to write music and let music speak for itself is you let the melodies and let the lyrics and the groove talk to people instead of me talking to people.
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As a girl who was raised on the idea that we should give back to our community as much as possible, I believe that we have more power than we think when it comes to making change.
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Comics seldom move me the way I would be moved by a novel or movie.
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The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind no background.
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The hardest thing I do on stage is to self-induce amnesia. I want to go on every night and say, 'I've never sat in this chair. I've never been in this room.'
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There are these very poor communities on the outskirts of Cairo called Mokattam, where a lot of the garbage collectors live. I used to volunteer there, doing health and education work when I was younger and living in Egypt.
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In this case we're building a corner to stretch a fence and hang a gate. It had a real purpose in the ranch here. I needed to do this. But at the same time, it made a beautiful structure.
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If you have been afraid that your love of beautiful flowers and the flickering flame of the candle is somehow less spiritual than living in starkness and ugliness, remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation.
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Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
