Ayana Mathis Quotes - Page 2

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• I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

  Ayana Mathis

  Moving, Thinking, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It's like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding.

  Ayana Mathis

  Thinking, Twists, Horizon

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

  Ayana Mathis

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• By sixteen I thought, "Ah, this is all crap, you're all sheep, I'm not going to church, leave me alone." And then at a certain point in my teens I started to go to Catholic churches, by myself. Not because I wanted to be Catholic, but because I wanted to light a candle and say something like a prayer and just sit there. There was something I was missing or trying to reconnect with. But it was a secret at the time. I'd developed this cynical persona and the last thing I wanted to admit was that I was skulking around churches in my spare time.

  Ayana Mathis

  Prayer, Missing, Cynical

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• At some point I just acknowledged, at least to myself, that I had a great deal of respect for people of faith. Faith is a strange and wonderful thing. You come up to a kind of wall of unknowing and instead of turning back in despair you leap over it into something else. The Church isn't why I'm a writer, but it's probably a part of it.

  Ayana Mathis

  Wall, People, Despair

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Certainly I had from an early age a sense of the power and beauty of religious texts - the awesome magnitude of the Bible stories I was reading as a child. The hymns. The sermons. I can still vividly hear the sermons and the pieces of soft piano music played after them, the preacher asking if anyone wanted to come up to the altar and accept Christ as their savior.

  Ayana Mathis

  Religious, Children, Reading

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The ways in which theological constructs pose questions about what it is to be a human being on this earth are deeply elegant and deeply interesting to me. I may not always agree with the answers religion offers, but I take great interest in the questions it poses.

  Ayana Mathis

  Interesting, Earth, Theological

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience - for a moment - an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you. Whatever you think of them, they are powerful experiences.

  Ayana Mathis

  Children, Powerful, Drama

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was interested in urban planning. I became an urban studies major, with a minor in poetry. I don't think I knew what I was looking for in my early twenties, but I know I kept not finding it.

  Ayana Mathis

  College, Thinking, Urban

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I started writing the book without realizing I was writing a book. That sounds stupid, but it's true. I'd been trying and failing to make a different manuscript work, and I thought I was just taking a break by writing some short stories. I'm not a very good short story writer - the amazing compression that is required for short stories doesn't come easily to me. But anyway, I thought I'd try to write some short stories. And a structure took shape - I stumbled upon it.

  Ayana Mathis

  Stupid, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

  Ayana Mathis

  Spring, Thinking, Imagination

  "Twelve Tribes of Hattie Author Ayana Mathis Talks Fiction, Family, and (Sometimes) Faking It". Interview with Meredith Turits, www.glamour.com. December 17, 2012.

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