Quotes from Chris Abani

Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.

That women are mysterious and unknowable is something every young man grows up believing. Men, on the other hand, never think of themselves as mysterious or confusing, and we are often at a loss as to why women want to figure us out.

In the old country my mother planted flowers in the face of my father's disdain. In every garden, in every house, no matter how long we lived there. I think it was the war, the Blitz in England, that took all the flowers. I think it was for the love she couldn't show him. I think it was for me. To show me that only the unspeakable remains.

Every day is a careful balance fought between the despondency that threatens to swamp me and the incredible joy of living.

I woke with the taste of your apple pie in my mouth, carried over no doubt from my dreams. It made me realize how much I miss you and our home.

But how long before this desperate wickedness overruns the qualms of good people? Before the desire for the smell of cooking meat, the softness of flesh, breaks us all?

I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.

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.

Remember always that freedom, love, kindness, honour, justice and truth are never to be taken for granted--but worked at, struggled with and fought for, at whatever cost. For it is this that makes us human and builds a bridge to our true nature, which is spirit.

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.

See you spend your whole life fighting with your father and no time on making your own life. What will you do when he dies? Fight yourself?

I have been thinking, my love, and on my return, I would like to reveal the truth of us, of myself. I am tired of this restrictive masculine role.

In that year, I came to question everything I had believed in before. The only thing I never gave up on was the conviction that there can be no concession in the face of tyranny and oppression.

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

The problem with mango plucking is the fruit falls too quickly; and harvest season is over far too soon.

As with much of the world's problems, they become public--or much more of interest--the moment they begin to impact the West.

My finger travels the longest carved line on the face, the thickest welt, up that face. From the base of the jaw all the way up the cheek, stopping just short of the abalone shell eye. These lines cut into the wood are meant to mimic the ancient facial tattoos that marked these ancestors as men, as warriors, as worthy of carrying their lineage back into the place of death and yet forward into the place of tomorrow.

I didn't leave Africa, I left Nigeria, and for political reasons. But ... I've never, never left Africa, and I certainly never left what it means to be Ibo. That is something you carry with you.

I think that my art, my poetry, prose and music come from these cracks in my being, these ley lines where spirit is said to reside. I have come out of the horror of that experience having lost my faith in the inherent goodness of humanity, yet curiously appreciating even more the effort it takes to be good.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum--so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.

Deach becomes some men. Others wear it shamefully; others still, defiantly. Their protest choking, suffocating.

There are things you can only say with a canyon. Or smoke moving across a vally toward the mist.

For is prayer not disobedience? The questioning of God's order?

The wind is calling in a voice I remember.