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Undecided about whether to pursue art or engineering, he pursued engineering, but with a continued interest in design—for his senior school project, he had designed a city of the future (à la Fritz Lang's Metropolis) based on a hexagonal grid. Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.

— Jane Smiley The Man Who Invented the Computer (2010)

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More quotes by Jane Smiley

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2006)

She said, “Some are born bossy, some achieve bossiness, and some have bossiness thrust upon them.”

Golden Age (2015)

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

Charles Dickens (2003)

What truly horsey girls discover in the end is that boyfriends, husbands, children, and careers are the substitute — for horses.

A Year at the Races (2004)

I learned why "out riding alone" is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jane Smiley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.