104 Quotes by Chris Abani

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.

Sometimes it is enough to know that it is difficult.

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.

Men do communicate, often very directly, but women sometimes cannot accept how simple what we have to say is. We seldom play games – we aren’t that sophisticated.

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.

He knew that scar, that pain, that shame, that degradation that no metaphor could contain, inscribing it on his body. And yet beyond that, he was that scar, carved by hate and smallness and fear onto the world’s face. He and everyone like him, until the earth was aflame with scarred black men dying in trees of fire.

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.

My mom taught me to read when I was two or three. When I was five I read and wrote well enough to do my nine-year older brother’s homework in exchange for chocolate or cigarettes. By the time I was 10, I was reading Orwell, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the Koran. I was reading comic books too.

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.