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
“Harte Arbeit, spärliches Brot - doch die alte Sonne a Himmel. Und vielleicht spricht das Herz noch einmal. Was habe ich alles gehabt in meinem Leben - überreichlich!”
― quote from A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary
“Maybe drinking five or six ales before getting into a massive brawl hadn't been the wisest choice.”
― Megan Derr, quote from Tournament of Losers
“The sun was already long past the spire when Garrick purchased a mug of coffee from his regular man on the tip of Oxford Street. But his palate had been educated by 21st century coffee, and he judged this mug as bilge water not fit for the Irish.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Reluctant Assassin
“Well, if 'exciting means drama and people dying and doctors and nurses rushing around like in the movies, then no, it wasn't. But if it means doing something that seems small now but can make a big difference in the long run, then it was.”
― Jennifer Latham, quote from Dreamland Burning
“Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics.”
― quote from Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
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