Athenaeum Philadelphia Quotes

#1. I think it's very important for me to work on myself while I'm working on a character, and also it's important how I'm giving to and educating an audience. So I tend to go with people who are complex and substantive.

Judith Light

#2. My faith was started off by my grandmother and mother, and so I always saw it as a very private, personal thing.

Leila Aboulela

#3. To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year's worth or corn or beans, it seems, you can believe in anything.

Nick Reding

#4. There is a psychospiritual disease of the soul that originates within ourselves and that has the potential to destroy our species or to wake us up, depending on whether or not we recognize what it is revealing to us.

Paul Levy

#5. Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived - an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism - then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.

Reza Aslan

#6. Actually I liked that 'Let the Right One In,' that Swedish vampire movie.

David Sedaris

#7. I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.

Claire Tomalin

#8. Empathy is a creative act. It is the act of imagining ourselves not only in another's shoes, but perhaps inhabiting their very heart and soul.

Michele Jennae

#9. On Jan. 1, 2012, I resolved to not buy anything from Amazon for a year.

Maria Semple

#10. Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

G.H. Hardy