Personal Life
Norquist has described himself as a "boring white bread Methodist." In 2004, at age 48, he married a Palestinian Muslim named Samah Alrayyes, a Kuwaiti PR specialist who was formerly a director of the Islamic Free Market Institute and specialist at the Bureau of Legislative and Public Affairs at United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The couple has two children adopted from abroad. Norquist is said to live a modest lifestyle. According to friend and former roommate John Fund, Norquist's devotion to his political causes is "monk-like" and comparable to that of Ralph Nader.
Norquist has competed three times in the comedy fundraiser "Washington's Funniest Celebrity" and placed second in 2009. Humorist P. J. O'Rourke has described Norquist as "Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupçon of Madame Defarge".
Read more about this topic: Grover Norquist
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The value of life lies not in the length of days but in the use you make of them; he has lived for a long time who has little lived.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)