Quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

“Rhetoric is what shapes history, if not truth.”

“I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. I...”

“The individuals inside are frequently fighting that their individual voices be heard, while the walls of the place, which are the mask, and the perception, are reluctant to give over to the voices ...”

“Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.”

“We spend so much time bantering about the words when the real open conversations might very well be our actions. I worry about our rhetoric.”

“Even jealousy is based on fantasies: a fantasy that someone else has what belongs to you.”

“I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I wen...”

“Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.”

“Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put...”

“I think we need leadership that helps us remember that part of what we are about is caring about more than the person right next to us, but the folks across the way.”

“I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write ...”

“Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.”

“Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awaken...”

“Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where characte...”

“President Obama called for a 'we' nation in his Inauguration Address. Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our h...”

“Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character...”