A Quote by Anna Deavere Smith

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 of the individuals. Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance. Part of the identity of a place is the tension between those in the margins, and those in the center, and they all live behind the walls which wear the tradition.

Anna Deavere Smith

Quote Topics

Always Always Trying Behind Between Center Distance Fighting Frequently Get Give Heard Identity Individual Individuals Inside Keep Live Margins Mask Name Over Part Perception Place Reluctant Tension Those Tradition Trying Voices Walls Wear Which While

Quote Author

Anna Deavere Smith
American - Actress
Born: September 18, 1950

Those in the margins are always trying to get to the center, and those at the center, frequently in the name of tradition, are trying to keep the margins at a distance.

Anna Deavere Smith

I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.

Aleksandar Hemon

Back in the '60s and '70s, data were scarce, and while analysts knew that companies with fat gross margins lagged those with thin gross margins early in bull markets - and overachieved in the later phases - they couldn't do much about it.

Kenneth Fisher

I am not a representative of anything. When art historians or critics or the public put somebody in a drawer like this, it has a tranquilizing, paralyzing effect. Artists are individuals. They have ideas, and the conventions for one's self as an individual are not for a group. There are always those who follow the group, but they belong in the margins. I refuse to be placed within, or added to, one particular school.

Georg Baselitz

Percentage margins don't matter. What matters always is dollar margins: the actual dollar amount. Companies are valued not on their percentage margins, but on how many dollars they actually make, and a multiple of that.

Jeff Bezos

The center of the chessboard is a magnet, which pulls to itself all the pieces. Therefore the most beautiful and amazing moves, for me, are those with which a piece, counteracting the gravitational force of the center, suddenly fly to the edge of the board.

Ashot Nadanian

For over twenty years, Homeboy Industries has chosen to stand with those on the margins and those whose burdens are more than they can bear; it stands with the poor and the powerless, with the easily-despised and the readily-left out.

Greg Boyle

It's funny: By putting up walls, you think you're protecting yourself, but you get to live less. You're depriving yourself of so much if you're trying to be too aware of what you're putting out there. If you feel someone breaking those walls down, let them. Those are the people that you need to find in life, rather than people that you're just comfortable with.

Kristen Stewart

I don't think there is anything as powerful as an active heart. They do not fear the wisdom of emotion, but embody it. They know how to listen. They are polite when they need to be and unyielding when necessary. They remain open, even as they push boundaries and inhabit the margins, understanding eventually, the margins will move toward the center. They are tenacious, informed, patient, and impatient, at once. They do not shy away from what is difficult. They refuse to accept the unacceptable. The most effective activists I know are in love with the world.

Terry Tempest Williams

It is important to remember all true change begins at the margins and moves toward the center. This does not make the climate change movement marginal, it makes it muscular, organic, with a true movement toward the center.

Terry Tempest Williams

The book [Saving Calvinism] argues in each case that the Reformed tradition is broader and deeper than we might think at first glance - not that there are people on the margins of the tradition saying crazy things we should pay attention to, but rather that there are resources within the "mainstream" so to speak, which give us reason to think that the tradition is nowhere near as doctrinally narrow as the so-called "Five Points of Calvinism" might lead one to believe.

Oliver D. Crisp

It is the growing periphery of the Arab world - the masses at its margins, not its feeble and decaying center - that is shaping the future of the region.

Wadah Khanfar

The degree to which the opportunity to use power effectively is granted to or withheld from individuals is one operative difference between those companies which stagnate and those which innovate.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

I consider as lovers of books not those who keep their books hidden in their store-chests and never handle them, but those who, by nightly as well as daily use thumb them, batter them, wear them out, who fill out all the margins with annotations of many kinds, and who prefer the marks of a fault they have erased to a neat copy full of faults.

Desiderius Erasmus

While the Copernican principle comes with no guarantees that it will forever guide us to cosmic truths, it's worked quite well so far: not only is Earth not in the center of the solar system, but the solar system is not in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy is not in the center of the universe, and it may come to pass that our universe is just one of many that comprise a multiverse. And in case you're one of those people who thinks that the edge may be a special place, we are not at the edge of anything either.