Maya Soetoro-Ng Quotes
My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community. He never went to prayer services except for big communal events. I am absolutely certain that my father did not go to services every Friday. He was not religious.

Quotes to Explore
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About the most exciting thing a baby can do is burp - I've spent hours of my life holding a baby on my shoulder and patting its back, trying to loosen up a burp. Burping was probably invented to give the father something positive to do, since our chests are not equipped to allow us to do much else.
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I just see religious freedom, as a category, as just being a black hole.
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I was doing community theater since I was about nine.
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Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.
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When I was in college at Amherst, my father asked me a favor: to take one course in economics. I loved it - for the challenge of its mysteries.
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My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn't be a dame.
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I am certainly not a good Muslim. But I am able now to say that I am Muslim; in fact it is a source of happiness to say that I am now inside, and a part of the community whose values have always been closest to my heart.
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I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.
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So as I was growing up, my father was always in the middle of making a film or preparing a film. It was a full-time, all-consuming type of operation.
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Your evolutionary heuristics come back to the idea of a future roughly similar to what it is now. You give to the community as it is now, to benefit a similar community in the future.
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When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love.
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I'm a lobbyist and had a career lobbying. The guy who gets elected or the lady who gets elected president of the United States will immediately be lobbying. They would be advocating to the Congress, they'll be lobbying our allies and our adversaries overseas. They'll be asking the business community and labor unions.
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My father has been a voice of encouragement in times of desperation for so many people. But he died when I was so young that, for me, his music has been a way for me to get to know him better.
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It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.
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The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
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I have never been a material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love you back.
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It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.
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In the Bronx, you have the southern Italians; in Queens, the Greeks, Koreans and Chinese; in Brooklyn, the Jewish community; and in Harlem, the Hispanics - all with their own markets.
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My father came from old money. There was less of an expectation for the children to earn a living.
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My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.
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Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
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Every time a young girl comes in and asks me for advice, if you start your conversation with, 'How hard is it as a black woman,' or, 'How hard is it as a woman,' I turn you around. Because I cannot - we cannot look at the roadblocks and see the road at the same time.
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Freedom is the oxygen without which science cannot breathe.
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My father saw Islam as a way to connect with the community. He never went to prayer services except for big communal events. I am absolutely certain that my father did not go to services every Friday. He was not religious.