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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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Amy Waldman
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: May 21
Author
Journalist
Writer
the United States of America
Aren
Perform
Abortions
Violence
Abortion
Crusades
Century
Helped
Gays
Christian
Gay
Harmless
Words
Murder
Latent
Slavery
Centuries
Today
Doctors
Theology
Even
Bible
Justify
Inert

More quotes by 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 read Claire Messud's 'The Emperor's Children,' I read Joseph O'Neill's 'Netherland' - but to me, they're not 9/11 novels. In 'The Emperor's Children,' 9/11 felt to me like a piece of the plot the novel wasn't wrestling with what 9/11 meant. And 'Netherland' felt the same way. I liked both books a lot but I don't see them as 9/11 novels.
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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In America time was gold in Bangladesh, corrugated tin.
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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So the premise of 'The Submission' is that there's an anonymous competition to design a 9/11 memorial and it's won by an American Muslim, an architect born and raised in Virginia, and his name is Mohammad Khan.
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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Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.
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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Fabricating reality was criminal editing it, commonplace.
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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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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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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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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Nothing in life gets dropped without someone else having to pick it up.
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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[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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I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking I really want to write a novel.
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