Quotes by Academics - Page 17

It is true that I suffered in a difficult and stupid love affair and that I worked at one bad job after another to try to keep myself going. Nevertheless, I remember that time as extraordinary, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't even wish now that I had more money. And had I been asked if I was suffering at the time, I would have said a defiant no.

There is abundant scholarship which establishes that the delegitimation of homosexual desire and the production of the naturally heterosexual, properly bi-gendered (unambiguously male or female) population of citizens, with the women respectably desexualized, is a process that is central to nation formation all over the globe.

If the U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, they cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. On 9/11/2001, Americans noticed that payback can be a real motherfucker.

A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.

A Jew ain't only a religion, and it ain't a race. It isn't an ethnicity, and you aren't disqualified if you're good at spreading mayonnaise on white bread or bad at money or good at sports or bad at guilt. It ain't about whether your mother is Jewish or your father converted or both parents fasted on Yom Kippur. It don't matter if you were bar or bat mitzvahed, or if your grandma's recipe for chicken soup kicked Campbell's ass, or any of that. It ain't about a toe in Israel, or an opinion on Palestine, or an uncle who died of a heart attack in Brooklyn or Queens, or a family story from Ellis Island, or an aunt who was murdered by nazis or Russian pogromchiks, or whether or not three-fifths of your person is scared shitless of Auggie's "schvartzes," or at least the young bucks you see walking with guns out and half their pants down.

Society is what beats me. Alone I can be pretty good, but let me go among people and there’s the devil to pay.

In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.

Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.

A family that never embraces life's risks never really lives.

A good person. Not a bad resolution to make, in dark times.

Before we come to Christ, we must come to ourselves.

Loneliness why do you accompany me if I wish to be alone?

From where would failed Americans leap if all of our towering buildings were razed to the ground? He envisions inflated airfares to Niagara Falls; renewed interest in the nations dams and gorges; long lines at the Grand Canyon, potential suicides being asked to take a numbered ticket, to wait their turn. Couldn't Al Qaeda see that we are killing our own well enough? Competitive society creates deep-rooted feelings of failure. On our own we succeed at self-termination; America needs no foreign aid from these murderers.

My point is that when you fall in love it's with a real person with flaws. Not with a perfect character from a fairy tale.

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.