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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
Emotional
Devices
Motivational
Metaphor
Within
Extreme
Allusion
Religious
Anti
Rhetorical
Community
Extremes
Relying
Knowledge
Believer
Assumes
Assuming
Believers
Speech
Literal

More quotes by 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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Jealousy clings to love's underside like bats to a bridge.
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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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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I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?
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 had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
Amy Waldman
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Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.
Amy Waldman
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As a reporter you tend to seek coherence from your subject or your source - it all needs to add up and make sense. In truth, in reality, there's often a great deal of murkiness and muddiness, confusion and contradiction.
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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Perhaps this was the secret to being at peace: want nothing but what is given to you.
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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The rhetoric is the first step, it coarsens attitudes
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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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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And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.
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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Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.
Amy Waldman
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Sorrow can be a bully.
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