Top 67 Chris Abani Quotes
#1. She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away.
Chris Abani
#2. What I do is create a lens through my work that corrects my readers' cognitive dissonance and says: you will see all of it - not what you want or what makes you comfortable, but all of it. And you will not erase what displeases you.
Chris Abani
#3. It takes me forever to actually finish something like a ten-page essay. But, when I do, I usually love what they are. It's a complicated relationship.
Chris Abani
#5. When I was growing up in Nigeria - and I shouldn't say Nigeria, because that's too general, but in Afikpo, the Igbo part of the country where I'm from - there were always rites of passage for young men. Men were taught to be men in the ways in which we are not women; that's essentially what it is.
Chris Abani
#6. The Igbo used to say that they built their own gods. They would come together as a community, and they would express a wish. And their wish would then be brought to a priest, who would find a ritual object, and the appropriate sacrifices would be made, and the shrine would be built for the god.
Chris Abani
#7. as his mother told Grandma Marie, there are no words for some
Chris Abani
#8. I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.
Chris Abani
#9. Abigail read in Reader's Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes. Like the way we live our lives, she thought. Bumble through doing the best we can and hoping that some benevolence keeps us from crashing.
Chris Abani
#10. Circuses are about entertainment and juggling and animals and all that shit. Sideshows are about freaks, about people and the limits of acceptability. We push those limits. If a circus is an escape, Fire said, a sideshow is a confrontation.
Chris Abani
#11. Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody.
Chris Abani
#12. If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.
Chris Abani
#13. Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.
Chris Abani
#14. African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.
Chris Abani
#15. My friend Ronald Gottesman says ... that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.
Chris Abani
#16. This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.
Chris Abani
#17. What we know about who we are comes from stories. It's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.
Chris Abani
#18. But the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people
Chris Abani
#19. In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.
Chris Abani
#20. I didn't leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But ... I've never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you.
Chris Abani
#21. As with much of the world's problems, they become public
or much more of interest
the moment they begin to impact the West.
Chris Abani
#22. Your anatomy is a mystery that nobody bothers explaining to us. Even when we think we have mastered one woman's body, every body is different.
Chris Abani
#23. All my characters exist in risk, in the places we are either too afraid to go to, or have enough privilege not to have to, but whatever the reason, these characters I fashion go before us and come back transformed for us. For me, at least.
Chris Abani
#24. There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had.
Chris Abani
#25. Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is.
Chris Abani
#26. Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression
how long before the pot boiled over.
Chris Abani
#27. The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.
Chris Abani
#28. That women are mysterious and unknowable is something every young man grows up believing. Men, on the other hand, never think of themselves as mysterious or confusing, and we are often at a loss as to why women want to figure us out.
Chris Abani
#29. What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.
Chris Abani
#30. Before you speak, my friend, remember, a spiritual man contain his anger. Angry words are like slap in de face.
Chris Abani
#31. I read everywhere. It's like a bodily function. I don't need quiet. I write and read with the TV on. I follow the TV show while I read. TV doesn't require a lot of brainpower.
Chris Abani
#32. Nigerians are everywhere. There's an old joke, particularly about the Ibos, that when you finally land on Mars, you're going to find a Nigerian there who has a shop that is selling Coca-Cola
who took a speculative trip 20 years ago and has been waiting for everyone else to arrive.
Chris Abani
#33. I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.
Chris Abani
#34. The wind is calling in a voice I remember
Chris Abani
#35. Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.
Chris Abani
#36. When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's 'Another Country,' and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. 'Here,' Jimmy said. 'Here is love, all of it.
Chris Abani
#37. My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.
Chris Abani
#38. I think it's an aggregation of all of the small acts that are really transformative. I think a group of small acts transform the individual. And maybe when the individual transforms, collectively we transform.
Chris Abani
#39. I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book.
Chris Abani
#40. We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.
Chris Abani
#41. My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.
Chris Abani
#42. My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s.
Chris Abani
#43. If you want to know about Africa, read our literature
and not just 'Things Fall Apart,' because that would be like saying, 'I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America.
Chris Abani
#44. Every successful artist comes from a family - parents or siblings or both - who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the treacherous and difficult path of the artist.
Chris Abani
#45. Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.
Chris Abani
#46. Sometimes I feel very alone. I am a bit of a nomad. Many people in sort of emerging countries, emerging economies, find themselves displaced. So there is that sense, and so I'm part of a whole, I think, group of displaced people.
Chris Abani
#47. You know, you can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror. But the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you.
Chris Abani
#48. Fire and Water are archetypes, the split sides of consciousness; one aware, the other, not. The two parts of us that desire synthesis, yet resist it: the self and the shadow. But they are also the element of chance, of the random roll of dice.
Chris Abani
#49. Narrative is a very feeble weapon in the face of human darkness and yet it's all we have. That we have to hang the transformation and survival of our species on the journey and transformation of one singular person so far outside of what we expect they can do.
Chris Abani
#50. If I don't get at least one e-mail every ten minutes, I feel unloved. Even junk mail makes me feel seen. Sad, I know. Sigh.
Chris Abani
#51. I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
Chris Abani
#52. He too, it seemed, had come to believe that he could somehow escape history. That it was possible, and even desirable, to live in a perpetual present.
Chris Abani
#53. It is easy to forget the decadence of glass. How some of us find it only in fragments. The glass between us and the world is often the measure of our wealth. Looking out at the world through it colors the hunger beyond.
Chris Abani
#54. There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe's work. We are either resisting him - stylistically, politically, or culturally - or we are writing toward him.
Chris Abani
#55. Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?
Chris Abani
#56. The problem is we're looking for something that doesn't exist. We're looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. There is either good art or bad art. Art is never about its content. It's about its scaffolding.
Chris Abani
#57. Here's the thing: You rescue us every day in small, quiet ways, so why not in this way? Let us into your mystery, tell us how you would like to be loved, show us how to see you, really see you.
Chris Abani
#58. I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.
Chris Abani
#59. People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes
Chris Abani
#60. My grand uncle was a traditional priest, and he would always say to me as a kid, 'We stand in our own light,' which essentially for him meant we were entirely responsible for a lot of what happens to us and for the ways in which our lives play out.
Chris Abani
#61. My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.
Chris Abani
#62. Sometimes it is enough to know that it is difficult.
Chris Abani
#63. I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
Chris Abani
#64. There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp.
Chris Abani
#65. I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.
Chris Abani
#66. Elvis, stop dat! You know it is taboo to whistle at night. You will attract a spirit.
Chris Abani
#67. Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.
Chris Abani
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