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Religious speech is extreme, emotional, and motivational. It is anti-literal, relying on metaphor, allusion, and other rhetorical devices, and it assumes knowledge within a community of believers.

Amy Waldman

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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Religious
Anti
Rhetorical
Community
Extremes
Relying
Knowledge
Believer
Assumes
Assuming
Believers
Speech
Literal
Emotional
Devices
Motivational
Metaphor
Within
Extreme
Allusion

More quotes by Amy Waldman

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As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
Amy Waldman
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Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine.
Amy Waldman
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Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.
Amy Waldman
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Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
Amy Waldman
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My children, who are almost two: watching them develop has made me pay much closer attention to how we become who we are.
Amy Waldman
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I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.
Amy Waldman
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In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
Amy Waldman
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While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated.
Amy Waldman
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My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end.
Amy Waldman
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In life, redemption was walking up the down escalator: stop to congratulate yourself, and back you slid.
Amy Waldman
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The September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon prompted a fundamental shift in the American government's approach to Islamic terrorism.
Amy Waldman
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I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.
Amy Waldman
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Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
Amy Waldman
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Fiction just has a lot more room for ambivalence and internal conflict, contradiction, and for me that sums up so much of what people felt after 9/11 - confusion even. And I think that's hard to capture in journalism.
Amy Waldman
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History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed.
Amy Waldman
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I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
Amy Waldman
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In architecture, space was a material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air.
Amy Waldman
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[s]he was a compulsive pessimist, always looking for the soft brown spot in the fruit, pressing so hard she created it.
Amy Waldman
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There were in life rarely, if ever, right decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.
Amy Waldman
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The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes
Amy Waldman