Anna Deavere Smith · 240 pages
Rating: (505 votes)
“We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you. Go for that communion, that real communion with your soul, and the discipline of expressing that communion with others. That doesn't come from competition. That comes from being one with what you are doing.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“My job in my work is not to acquire power; it's to question power.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”
― Anna Deavere Smith, quote from Letters to a Young Artist
Anna Deavere Smith
Born place: in Baltimore, MD, The United States
Born date September 18, 1950
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“Years ago, in a motivational seminar by the master, Zig Ziglar, I heard a story about how mediocrity will sneak up on you. The story goes that if you drop a frog into boiling water, he will sense the pain and immediately jump out. However, if you put a frog in room-temperature water, he will swim around happily, and as you gradually turn the water up to boiling, the frog will not sense the change. The frog is lured to his death by gradual change. We can lose our health, our fitness, and our wealth gradually, one day at a time. It might be a cliché, but that’s because it is true: The enemy of “the best” is not “the worst.” The enemy of “the best” is “just fine.”
― Dave Ramsey, quote from The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
“He comes from the grave, his body a home of worms and filth. No life in his eyes, no warmth of his skin, no beating of his breast. His soul, as empty and dark as the night sky. He laughs at the blade, spits at the arrow, for they will not harm his flesh. For eternity, he will walk the earth, smelling the sweet blood of the living, feasting upon the bones of the damned. Beware, for he is the living dead. —OBSCURE HINDU TEXT, CIRCA 1000 B.C.E.”
― Max Brooks, quote from The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
“It was the air she wanted and the world she would now exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say 'If I could lose myself here!' There were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal question; but she had blissfully left it outside...".”
― Henry James, quote from The Wings of the Dove
“He will love you with everything he has for as long as you let him.”
― Jamie McGuire, quote from A Beautiful Wedding
“What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.”
― Orson Scott Card, quote from Shadow of the Hegemon
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