Quintessentially Q Quotes & Sayings

For centuries, the Yangtze River - the longest in Asia - has played an important role in China's history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name. — Rebecca MacKinnon

The game created a parallel world, Sidney thought. It was drama; it was excitement; it was a metaphor for the vicissitudes of life. It was also quintessentially English: democratic (there were teams with all levels of ability), communal (the cricket 'square' was often at the centre of the village green), and convivial (the game was full of eccentric characters.) It was the representation of a nation's cuisine, with its milky tea, cucumber sandwiches, Victoria sponge and lashings of beer. It was also beautiful to watch, with fifteen men, dressed in white and moving on green, creating geometrical patterns that looked as if they had been choreographed by a divine choreographer. As — James Runcie

But once we recognize that many ideas that are taken to be quintessentially Western have also flourished in other civilizations, we also see that these ideas are not as culture-specific as is sometimes claimed. We need not begin with pessimism, at least on this ground, about the prospects of reasoned humanism in the world. — Amartya Sen

When you think about the word 'quintessentially', it's about trying to get to the very essence of something. — Ben Elliot

For neo-conservatism is a quintessentially Jewish project: a re-sanctification in everyday life of the core values of western civilisation, and the achievement of human potential through virtuous practice. The neo-cons' crucial insight is that public signals through law, custom and tradition are the key to getting people to behave well. And that is a Jewish insight. — Melanie Phillips

Such a quintessentially Human thing, to express sorrow through apology. — Becky Chambers

Baseball, football, basketball - these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn't play boxing ... The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness. — Joyce Carol Oates

I'd heard "Rhapsody in Blue" a thousand times and it always amazed me. It was so humble and then so bombastic. It was beautiful, bright, and terrifying: old and new, European and American. At times it sounded like Debussy, at times it sounded like Stravinsky, and at times it sounded like the Lower East Side in 1910.
"Rhapsody in Blue" was a quintessentially New York work of art, but it was also about moving from east to west, from the old world to the new... — Moby

I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul. — Orhan Pamuk

With epic fantasy, there is a tendency for it to be quintessentially conservative in that its job is to restore what is perceived to be out of whack. — N.K. Jemisin

I've always wanted to be able to say that I come from Los Angeles, California and feel quintessentially American - even if I said that in Spanish. — Cheech Marin

Ablaze with alabaster one must admit
as long as there is near music kicking around
nowhere more winsome than in the outlandish passage
from April to California, Sunday to Jose, March to French
and all the wilderness and Septembers in between.
Slow ghost thicket, a tempo of someone's own,
please please the quintessentially readymade
and risen stranger, the tremor in the house,
rather than some unfinished crime without dragon
or alibi in the drowsy garden.
O savage, O brightening Niagara,
O briefest, fussy thing in ruffled light,
wait, I am a stranger here myself. — Paul Vangelisti

It's wrong, and it's racist, and it's bigoted to say that guns are quintessentially American. — Alan Dershowitz

RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthopraxy (the correct interpretation of rituals), though one is often emphasized over the other. Christianity may be the supreme example of an "orthodoxic" religion; it is principally one's beliefs - expressed through creed - that make one a faithful Christian. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Judaism, a quintessentially "orthopraxic" religion, where it is principally one's actions - expressed through the Law - that make one an observant Jew. It is not that beliefs are irrelevant in Judaism, or actions unimportant in Christianity. Rather, it is that of the two religions, Judaism places far greater emphasis on orthopraxic behavior than does Christianity. — Reza Aslan

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in — Iain M. Banks

My commitment to gender equality is rooted in the quintessentially American principle of equal justice under law. — Eric Schneiderman

Average household credit card debt topped the landmark of $10,000 in 2006, a hundredfold increase over the average consumer debt in the 1960s. One consequence: Much of the material buried in landfills in recent years was bought with those same credit cards, leading to the quintessentially American practice of consumers continuing to pay, sometimes for years, for purchases after they become trash. — Edward Humes

But are you finding monastic history a very compelling reason to live?"
"I'm not human," he said. "I don't require a reason to live. Living is my default condition."
I couldn't help it; I laughed, and teas weleld in my eyes. That answer was quintessentially Orma, distilled to his elemental Orma-ness. — Rachel Hartman

It is often said, rather flatly, that Russian ballet was a mix of French, Scandinavian (through the teacher Johansson), and Italian sources - that Russia, through Petipa, absorbed all of these and made them her own. This is certainly true; but what really changed ballet was the way it became entwined with Imperial Russia herself. Serfdom and autocracy, St. Petersburg and the prestige of foreign culture, hierarchy, order, aristocratic ideals and their ongoing tension with more eastern folk forms: all of these things ran into ballet and made it a quintessentially Russian art. — Jennifer Homans

I knew Quintessentially was a success when my father, who does a lot of business in Beirut, introduced himself to somebody and they said, 'Oh, do you know Ben Elliot? I'd really like to meet him.' I remember him ringing me up, really annoyed. — Ben Elliot

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. — Susan Cain

What is it about a hand that seems quintessentially human? The answer must, at some level, be that the hand is a visible connection between us; it is a signature for who we are and what we can attain. Our ability to grasp, to build, and to make our thoughts real lies inside this complex of bones, nerves, and vessels. — Neil Shubin

The pressure to be quintessentially black in every moment, whether it comes from the outside world or is self-imposed, keeps black people from being our authentic selves. — Justin Simien

"Point of view" is that quintessentially human solution to information overload, an intuitive process of reducing things to an essential relevant and manageable minimum.. In a world of hyper abundant content, point of view will become the scarcest of resources. — Paul Saffo

We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we be seriously considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment? perhaps as a race, we have evolved as far as we are capable, yet that by no means suggests that evolution has called it quits. in all likelihood, it has something beyond human on the drawing board. we tend to refer to our most barbaric and crapulous behavior as "inhuman," whereas, in point of fact, it is exactly human, definitively and quintessentially human, since no other creature habitually indulges in comparable atrocities. this negates neither our occasional virtues nor our aesthetic triumphs, but if a being at least a little bit more than human is not waiting around the bend of time then evolution has suffered a premature ejaculation. — Tom Robbins

And I'll go even further and say that mathematics, this art of abstract pattern-making - even more than storytelling, painting, or music - is our most quintessentially human art form. This is what our brains do, whether we like it or not. We are biochemical pattern-recognition machines and mathematics is nothing less than the distilled essence of who we are. — Paul Lockhart

If I had to pick one song for me that sort of quintessentially summed me up, it would be 'Angel.' Without fail, I absolutely love singing it. — Sarah McLachlan

You know those high school teachers who so quintessentially and stereotypically embody their subject matter that it is as if they were cast by a director? Mr. Carter was like that. I did not know they still made glasses like his glasses. He told us his dog was named "Dooty," short for Dooty Dexy, which is a phoneticized version of the calculus formula for second derivatives. — Katie Heaney

It is existentially, hyperbolically, quintessentially unknowable. — Gregory Maguire

People have lots of misconceptions about me. My mum, who is half French and half Spanish, gets outraged when I'm called quintessentially English. I owe my looks to my mum-which was 90 percent of getting my first job. And, some people would argue, 90 percent of my entire career. — Helena Bonham Carter