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I remember from my father's funeral that the minister kept using a metaphor about life of a prism. And I took that away like a cherished image.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Anna Deavere Smith
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 18
Academic
Actor
Actress
Film Actor
Playwright
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
University Teacher
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Anna Smith
Anna Devere Smith
Anna Deveare Smith
Father
Minister
Away
Funeral
Remember
Ministers
Life
Metaphor
Like
Kept
Using
Prism
Image
Prisms
Took
Cherished
More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith
Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
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When I was a kid, my grandfather said that if you say a word often enough, it becomes you. Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.
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You know, real artists, we expose our flaws. We long for intimacy.
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Movies, as evidenced by a chorus of protesting and celebrating Americans, influence broader trends.
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I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.
Anna Deavere Smith
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 awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?
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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 went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.
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I mean, I think a healthy country is a country where people are healthy physically, and a smart country is a country where people are educated.
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Art simply can’t be stopped.
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If you say a word often enough it becomes you.
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Listening is not just hearing what someone tells you word for word. You have to listen with a heart. I don't want that to sound touchy-feely it is not. It is very hard work.
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You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.
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I love studying how people are. Not just what they're saying, but how they are, what they're doing.
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I have never been in a violent movie or television show.
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The American idea is as promising, imaginative, and full of the unexpected as the land itself. The land represents freedom - the frontier, the ability to make a new future with your own bare hands.
Anna Deavere Smith
I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.
Anna Deavere Smith
Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.
Anna Deavere Smith
If I do three interviews in a day, I can be exhausted, because the process of hearing everyone requires that I empty out myself. While I'm listening, my own judgments and prejudices certainly come up. But I know I won't get anything unless I get those things out of the way.
Anna Deavere Smith
In my profession, I'm around a lot of people whose bodies are their instruments in one way or another.
Anna Deavere Smith
Probably the person who said the only color in Los Angeles is green was right.
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