A Quote by Chris Abani

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

Chris Abani

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Always Amalgamation American American Slavery Capital Great Great Historical Historical History Holocaust Holocaust Survivor Imposing Lived Lives Many Moments Narratives Ordinary Personal Read Realize Simply Slavery Some Someone Survivor Time Too Truth Truth Is Very Ways Well Were

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Chris Abani
Nigerian - Author
Born: December 27, 1966

For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times.

Tom Reiss

I think comedy allows people to accept the more difficult parts of history. And history, if it's presented wrong, is just very depressing, particularly the history of slavery. If slavery is presented properly, it's a great story. But I think that within the commercial world of storytelling in which I live, there haven't been many strong works that discuss slavery in ways that are palatable and funny and interesting to the reader.

James McBride

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and his life and history were very formative to myself and my family. The almost unimaginable dichotomy between the different eras of his life always crushed my brain on some level. That this guy who was shoveling carob chips out of a barrel and restocking yogurt popsicles could also have those numbers on his arm. It was an inconceivable juxtaposition. His experience was the main window for our family into any kind of social consciousness, or sense of history, or politics, even though a lot of it went unsaid.

Jonathan Raymond

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage - almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance.

Thomas Cahill

It wasn't the first reality show, but 'Survivor' was the first big network hit, and I'm proud to have played a part in that history as the winner of season six, 'Survivor: Amazon.'

Jenna Morasca

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

Orson Scott Card

I'm a survivor. But I'm also victim, too. Surviving has the connotation that you've been through it, you lived through it and that's wonderful - but a victim is what I was. "Survivor" is the more healing way to look at it.

Margaret Cho

I studied African American studies, and I read these slave narratives and the escape narratives of people that were able to escape slavery and always found those stories intriguing and powerful and inspiring.

John Legend

Why more reality-based TV? You'd think that after the first 'Survivor' it would have gone away, but it hasn't. The public demands it because they get all caught up in the personal stories and want to see more and more. Every new 'Survivor' is going to show you more.

Montel Williams

There's a book that I read, really a great book - it's called 'Lone Survivor' and I think they're trying to make it into a movie. I would love to play Marcus Luttrell, who was the author and the 'lone survivor.' He's a national hero; he's very courageous and heroic in insurmountable danger, so it's something I'd love to explore.

Jared Padalecki

I see myself as a survivor, and I'm not ashamed to say I'm a survivor. To me, survivor implies strength, implies that I have been through something and I made it out the other side.

Elizabeth Smart

Muslims naturally saw Christendom as their arch rival. One point that is really important to bear in mind, particularly in addressing an American audience, and that is that the Islamic world has a very strong sense of history. In the Muslim world, history is important and their knowledge of history is not always accurate but is very detailed. There is a strong historical sense in the Muslim world, a feeling for the history of Islam from the time of the Prophet until the present day.

Bernard Lewis

I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American?

Michael Scott

Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments.

Elizabeth Kostova

I've always been interested in history, but they never taught Negro history in the public schools...I don't see how a history of the United States can be written honestly without including the Negro. I didn't [paint] just as a historical thing, but because I believe these things tie up with the Negro today. We don't have a physical slavery, but an economic slavery. If these people, who were so much worse off than the people today, could conquer their slavery, we can certainly do the same thing....I am not a politician. I'm an artist, just trying to do my part to bring this thing about.

Jacob Lawrence

I have to throw in on a personal note that I didn't like history when I was in high school. I didn't study history when I was in college, none at all, and only started to do graduate study when my children were going to graduate school. What first intrigued me was this desire to understand my family and put it in the context of American history. That makes history so appealing and so central to what I am trying to do.

Adele Logan Alexander

A Quote by Chris Abani

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