Chris Abani Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp. It has been three years of a senseless war, and though the reasons for it are clear, and though we will continue to fight until we are ordered to stop--and probably for a while after that--none of us can remember the hate that led us here. We are simply fighting to survive the war. It is a strange place to be at fifteen, bereft of hope and very nearly of your humanity. But that is where I am nonetheless.

  Chris Abani

  War, Hate, Fighting

  Chris Abani (2015). “Song For Night”, p.5, Saqi

• 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.

  Chris Abani

  Mom, Brother, War

  Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.bostonglobe.com. March 22, 2014.

• Much of the image of the amazingness of America comes from the movies into other cultures. And it's much the same thing when you reverse it. Much of Africa is presented through poverty, through drought and war. [But] you're not presenting people, you're not presenting countries, you're not presenting complexity, and so people can't care about an amorphous mass called Africa.

  Chris Abani

  Country, War, Other Cultures

• Literature is an aspect of story and story is all that exists to make sense of reality. War is a story. Now you begin to see how powerful story is because it informs our worldview and our every action, our every justification is a story. So how can story not be truly transformative? I've seen it happen in real ways, not in sentimental ways or in the jargon of New Age liberal ideology.

  Chris Abani

  Powerful, Real, War

  "The Rumpus Interview With Chris Abani". Interview with Peter Orner, therumpus.net. February 10, 2014.

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