Jane Smiley Quotes
'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.
Jane Smiley
Quotes to Explore
The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.
P. J. O'Rourke
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact.
Edmund Burke
I think of myself as a journeyman actor. I've got some talent and I work hard, but people like Brando or Pacino - those people are touched by God.
Sam Rockwell
From Syria even to Rome I fight with wild beasts, by land and sea, by night and by day, being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only grow worse when they are kindly treated.
Ignatius of Antioch
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas - uncertainty, progress, change - into crimes.
Salman Rushdie
I don't really like to talk about other people. I think people who have things going on in their lives, I think they have enough to deal with, they don't need, you know, Abigail Breslin weighing in on their lives.
Abigail Breslin
When he said we were trying to make a fool of him, I could only murmur that the Creator had beat us to it.
Ilka Chase
My wife attends a Presbyterian church.
Pat Robertson
I didn't have any friends, and I never went to the class parties.
Natassia Malthe
I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution.
Fanny Kemble
My bedroom is my sanctuary. It's like a refuge, and it's where I do a fair amount of designing - at least conceptually, if not literally.
Vera Wang
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
Abraham Verghese
We can't afford to go down the dead end roads of Parliamentary Socialism or Fascistic Bolshevism.
John Blair
In terms of a narrative nonfiction book, when you're describing scenes that you have multiple sources for, and that you have differing sources for, and you decide to choose a path that puts all that information together, well yeah, there's definitely going to be a little bit of the author in that. But there's nothing wrong with that.
Ben Mezrich
It was strange, I reflected, as we went out into the golden evening of the Byzantine streets, that even in the weirdest circumstances, the most troubling episodes of one’s life, the greatest divides from home and familiarity, there were these moments of undeniable joy.
Elizabeth Kostova
I didn't know what architecture was except that I lived in a house. I don't even think that I knew the word for a long time. My dad funneled me into engineering because it was his background.
Antoine Predock
You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralyzing venom, while the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing.
Bill Bailey
'Ape House' is an ambitious novel in several ways, for which it is to be admired, and it is certainly an easy read, but because Gruen is not quite prepared for the philosophical implications of her subject, it is not as deeply involving emotionally or as interesting thematically as it could be.
Jane Smiley
