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Use your time to bathe yourself in the gift. Move your hand across the canvas. Go to museums. Make this into an obsession.

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
Time
Across
Gift
Move
Hand
Moving
Bathe
Use
Museums
Hands
Canvas
Make
Obsession

More quotes by Anna Deavere Smith

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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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Then everyone leaves, and you are left, each night, to your own devices with a crowd of interesting people - most of whom you don't know - sitting in the dark.
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You are an explorer. You understand that every time you go into the studio, you are after something that does not yet exist.
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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 lives.
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Hope is when you look out the window and you go, 'It doesn't look good at all, but I'm going to go beyond what I see to give people visions of what could be.'
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I am not myself I am the potential of myself.
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I think some of our most talented people are not going to pick the arts as a way that they're going to spend their lives.
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Friendship is a wildly underrated medication.
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My work is about giving voice to the unheard, and reiterating the voice of the heard in such a way that you question, or re-examine, what is the truth.
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Self-esteem does not come from surrounding yourself with people and things that seem to increase your value. Real self-esteem is an integration of an inner-value with things in the world around you.
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I mean, I think that - as an actress, in particular, I'm basically a fool, and I see the world upside down.
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Discipline — both mental and physical — is crucial.
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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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I never know when somebody's going to knock on the door of my own unconscious in a way that I wouldn't have anticipated.
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When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
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I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.
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Learning is a tunnel experience that makes us think more broadly.
Anna Deavere Smith
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Many people are afraid to talk about race because it's so emotionally loaded. We don't have the vocabulary to talk about it. Every day, our vocabulary seems more and more inadequate.
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People in power have to be careful about what comes out of their mouth. They have to find exactly the right word that can't be attacked.
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Artists are the people that no matter what, pick up the pen, pick up a paintbrush. They take the time to translate what is happening to create something that resonates deeply with the rest of the people that are caught in the middle of their own reality.
Anna Deavere Smith