Chris Abani > Quotes

“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

“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, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. ”
― Chris Abani

“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

“The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation or what is possible.”
― Chris Abani

“The wind is calling in a voice I remember”
― Chris Abani, Song for Night

“Sometimes it is enough to know that it is difficult.”
― Chris Abani

“We are hunting the demons that haunt others. We get a smell and off we go. And you know why, Sunil? You know why we are so good at hunting the demons of others? Because we are so good, gifted even, at stalking and evading our own. But all demons hunters think that they are really heroes, and you know what all heroes need?”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“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

“This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten.”
― Chris Abani, Becoming Abigail

“Listening to the clack clack of the pal fronds form a percussive background to the oboe throb of the sea, he dozed off. An hour later, he woke with a start and, standing up, dusted off the seat of his trousers. White sand, in fine glittering silicon chips, clung to him, catching the sun, turning him into a patchwork fabric of diamonds and ebony.”
― Chris Abani, GraceLand

“Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody.”
― Chris Abani

“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.”
― Chris Abani, GraceLand

“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

“The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.”
― Chris Abani

“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, Becoming Abigail

“Thoughts of Abigail filled her world. By all accounts she had bee a tall, thin, woman, whose eyes held a power beyond the black pools of er irises. Tall, thin, and dark, she, this Abigail, looked so much like the other that her father had named her the same She was more ghost than her mother, however, moving with the quality of light breathing though a house in which the only footprints in the dust were those of her dead mother. Even her laughter, at once wild and reigned in, was all Abigail.”
― Chris Abani, Becoming Abigail

“What you hear is not my voice.
I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp. It has been three years of a senseless war, and though the reasons for it are clear, and though we will continue to fight until we are ordered to stop-and probably for a while after that-none of us can remember the hate that led us here. We are simply fighting to survive the war. It is a strange place to be at fifteen, bereft of hope and very nearly of your humanity. But that is where I am nonetheless.”
― Chris Abani, Song for Night

“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, Becoming Abigail

“circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell—the strange inverse sense of apartheid.”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“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

“... it's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are.”
― Chris Abani

“I would say it is because the striving and the power keep you from realizing just how helpless you really are. It protects you from facing the fact that others are manipulating you, that regardless of what you might claim, your philosophy is simply a way to rationalize what you do for others too afraid to do their own dirty work; that you are in a way also a victim of the apartheid state. You”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“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, Sanctificum

“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, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“as his mother told Grandma Marie, there are no words for some”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“Abigail read in Reader’s Digest that all plane landings were controlled crashes.”
― Chris Abani, Becoming Abigail

“Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression-how long before the pot boiled over.”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“I watch what happens below and I
am grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space”
― Chris Abani , Song for Night

“blacks. As in any free market, the coloreds were the middle classes, as it were—those who would give their lives to maintain the status quo, a life they knew they could never improve but which had meaning only because there were those who suffered worse; that in fact, a larger population suffered worse.”
― Chris Abani, The Secret History of Las Vegas

“for what was Christ if not God’s desire
to smell his own armpit? And when I
see him, I know he will smile,
fingers glued to his nose, and say, ‘Next time
I will send you down as a dog
to taste this pure hunger.”
― Chris Abani, Hands Washing Water