Quotes by Professors

She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.
Michelle Latiolais
She was proud of her build, which was in accordance with the old Botswana ideas of beauty, and she would not pander to the modern idea of slenderness. That was an importation from elsewhere, and it was simply wrong. How could a very thin woman do all the things that women needed to do: to carry children on their backs, to pound maize into flour out at the lands or the cattle post, to cart around the things of the household—the pots and pans and buckets of water? And how could a thin woman comfort a man? It would be very awkward for a man to share his bed with a person who was all angles and bone, whereas a traditionally built lady would be like an extra pillow on which a man coming home tired from his work might rest his weary head. To do all that you needed a bit of bulk, and thin people simply did not have that.
Alexander McCall Smith
And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.
Gary Shteyngart
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
Richard M. Rorty
Jesse and Frank James were the most well-known military-trained gang members
Carter F. Smith
I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
There was nothing else I could do but say sorry myself. His apology had left a residue in me, a residue on my thinking, and continuing on in this house without saying it would be entirely awkward. It would turn the small space toxic. So I said it, though I tried to lessen the potency of the apology by mumbling.
Alexandra Kleeman
A popular myth is that learning is largely a matter of motivation. Increasingly, the key to effective learning in the information era is how you think, not how you feel.
Kathryn Alesandrini
There are roads where people go, and where they should arrive is their mission.
Eraldo Banovac
Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys
Leslie Fielder
Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.
Elie Wiesel
Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.
Leslie Jamison
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.
Joyce Carol Oates
As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.
John Gardner
Somewhere in the distance I hear the bucket clatter to the floor. I plunge the knife into his head, again and again. His arms lash out blindly, getting in the way. Blood mixes with water cascading to the floor. Meathead staggers to his feet, pulling off his shirt, trying to peel away the agony, but his skin comes away with it, leaving a raw, red mess.There’s a shrill alarm and the sound of pounding feet. I hurl the knife through the bars at the window. A blur of dark faces converge in my vision, fists and feet, punching and kicking. Meathead’s mates are yanking me off, trying to hurt me. Screws come rushing and soon they’re everywhere as I’m half-carried, half-dragged along the corridor.t‘Blimey,’ a thought comes from somewhere in all the chaos, ‘I’ve only been out a day and already I’m heading straight back down the chokey!’ The last thing I see, as a screaming Meathead is hurried to the hospital, is my cellmate in the middle of the crowd peering worriedly after me. Course he’s worried! The stinky bastard is wondering where his next bit of scag is coming from!
Harry Shaw
In reality, commissions rarely solve complicated problems. Therefore, the following question arises: what is worse – to establish a commission knowing it cannot solve a complicated problem, or to believe that the commission will truly solve such a problem?
Eraldo Banovac
Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.
Mason Cooley
[O]ld enough to be wise yet young enough to be willing to partake in an arduous crusade.
Donald Kingsbury
We don't forget...Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, smells of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us of who we are.
Alexander McCall Smith
I hate when people say something is not their job or that something isn't possible. We all say these things, sure, but some people actually believe they don't have to work beyond what is written in their job description or that they don't have to try to reach those who seemingly cannot be reached.
Roxane Gay
The protesters have called into question whether there is a real democracy. Real democracy is more than the right to vote once every two or four years. The choices have to be meaningful. But increasingly, and especially in the US, it seems that the political system is more akin to "one dollar one vote" than to "one person one vote". Rather than correcting the market failures, the political system was reinforcing them.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.
George Saunders
But look around at this world, how perfectly it's made. Flowers can't move, yet the insects come to them and spread their pollen. Trees can't move either, but birds and animals eat their fruit and carry their seeds far and wide.
Nahoko Uehashi
Can you imagine doing ministry the last five hundred years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do books’? Can you imagine doing ministry in the next five years and getting away with ‘Sorry, I don’t do Facebook’?
Leonard Sweet
Most serious confrontations in life are not political, they are existential. One can agree with someone's political stance but disagree in a fundamental way with how they came to that position. It is a question of attitude, of moral configuration. My husband and I had plenty of grievances, but it all boiled down to a fundamental difference in the way we perceived life, the context within which we defined ourselves and our world. For that, there was no reconciliation or resolution, there was only separation or surrender.
Azar Nafisi
Define your mantras, your adages, and bear down repetitively -- over and over and over!
David R. Wommack
She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself.
Danielle Evans
She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them
Alexander McCall Smith
The web of trust is built at eye level, peer to peer.
Jeff Jarvis
My cell phone is my only individual zone, just for me.
Sherry Turkle
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Joyce Carol Oates
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
Joyce Carol Oates
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you're remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a little pat
Aimee Bender
It is our contemporary culture’s tragedy to have lost any sense of suffering as a positive dimension of human existence. Beginning with the premise that life ought to be without pain, we make suffering something to be avoided at all cost. We consider the equation between evil and suffering so self-evident that we make avoiding suffering the equal of fighting evil. No wonder we are the most narcotized generation ever to inhabit the earth, searching for ever more effective addictive patterns to anaesthetize our existence.
Luke Timothy Johnson
I want to weep too, not for me but for us all--for rich or poor, educated or illiterate, here we are finally reduced to a sameness in this sisterhood of deprivation.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.
Bart D. Ehrman
The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.
John Gardner
What will I do if I find myself with a heart?" "Lose it constantly, I imagine.
Gregory Maguire
Bring ideas in and entertain them royally, for one of them may be the king.
Mark Van Doren
I have always loved the many moods of the sky at Rocky Flats. Turquoise and teal in summer, fiery red at sunset, iron gray when snow is on the way. The land rolls in waves of tall prairie grass bowed to the wind, or sprawling mantles of white frosted with a thin sheath of ice in winter.
Kristen Iversen
give a woman the chance to reject something else besides me
Viet Thanh Nguyen
She walks to a tableShe walk to table She is walking to a tableShe walk to table now What difference does it makeWhat difference it make In Nature, no completenessNo sentence really complete thought Language, like woman,Look best when free, undressed.
Wang Ping
Ga thought about reminding the Dear Leader that they lived in a land where people had been trained to accept any reality presented to them.
Adam Johnson
His blank face communicated an emptiness that could never be filled"- Frank Balenger
David Morrell
They weren't hours, these classes; they weren't even forty-five minutes--they were "periods," which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and then the end you had to see decisively put to it.
Gary Lutz
The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!
Joyce Carol Oates
He prefers a deliberate performance that can be made to seem spontaneous.
Sherry Turkle
He'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.
Marie Rutkoski
Knowledge is a unique kind of property, indeed: you can share it with others, while still possessing it.
Eraldo Banovac
I figured this staying up meant something. Maybe it was loss or love or some other word that we say when it's too fucking late but the boys weren't into melodrama. They heard that shit and said no. Especially the Old Man. Divorced at twenty, with two kids down in D.C., neither of which he sees anymore. He heard me and said, Listen. There are forty-four ways to get over this. He showed me his bitten-up hands.
Junot Díaz
The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?
Alexander McCall Smith
In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!
Joyce Carol Oates
Is it necessary to believe in the existence of the six realms and the heavens and hells to be a Buddhist? Not necessarily. It is possible to interpret these as, perhaps, referring to other dimensions of existence, parallel universes, or simply states of mind.
Damien Keown
Like other discriminatory legislation in our country's history, immigration laws define and differentiate legal status on the basis of arbitrary attributes. Immigration laws create unequal rights. People who break immigration laws don't cause harm or even potential harm (unlike, for example, drunk driving, which creates the potential for harm even if no accident occurs). Rather, people who break immigration laws do things that are perfectly legal for others, but denied to them--like crossing a border or, even more commonly, simply exist.
Aviva Chomsky
And then Jonah heard God’s voice.t“Jonah, do you know what the difference is between you and the trees?”ttHe was confident it was God because God usually asked questions but gave no answers. Jonah didn’t need a divine answer to this question, he knew it.t“Yes,” he said. “The difference between me and the trees is that the trees let go of their leaves. I keep holding onto mine. The trees make room for new life. I don’t.
David W. Jones
We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic.
William Kittredge
Yeshua was a feminist. A feminist is a person who is in favor of, and promotes, the equality of women with men, who advocates and practices treating women primarily as human persons (as men are so treated) and willingly contravenes social customs in so acting.
Leonard Swidler
Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Too trying, this is all far too trying, Parma thought. An ogre I may outwit or a Rahg I may defeat, but a horde of frightened villagers? Auay! How does Brandegan put up with it?
Julius Bailey