Quotes by Professors - Page 16

Just because we have birds inside us, we don't have to be cages.
Dean Young
You are so hot,” I said.“How hot?” she asked, toying with the hem of the shirt.“Ionising radiation hot,” I said. “Neutral pion decay hot.”Elena snorted. “You’re such a romantic,” she said.
David Walton
The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.
Thomas C. Foster
She lifts her eyes, and there is Death in the corner, but not like a king with his iron crown, as the epics claimed. Why, it is a giant brush loaded with white paint. It descends upon her with gentle suddenness, obliterating the shape of the world.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
They'd never been lovers, of course, not in the physical sense. But they'd been lovers as most of us manage, loving through expressions and gestures and the palm set softly upon the bruise at the necessary moment. Lovers by inclination rather than by lust. Lovers, that is, by love.
Gregory Maguire
Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--from a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be . . . what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness.
Toni Morrison
What myth can hold when you kneel in your brother’s remains? When you slit his throat yourself? What story can guide us if we can betray all?
David Vann
To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.
Leon Eisenberg
Tangerine tango was still in. Cardigans without buttons were in. Bahia bands were in. Senhor do Bonfim. Make a wish? But hardly anyone considered the most radical move: be yourself. Beauty is always a revolutionary act.
Chris Campanioni
The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t hings as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.
Thomas Nagel
Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.
David Augsburger
Poverty said the same thing, century after century, but in different kinds of sentences.
Martin Amis
Many people are so poor that the only thing they have is money. Cultivate your spiritual growth.
Rodolfo Costa
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.
Toni Morrison
I don't put much stock in remembering things. Being able to forget is a superior skill.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
like traveling without knowing what country you’re going to
Austin Wright
…mischief, …arises not from our living in the world, but from the world living in us; occupying our hearts, and monopolizing our affections.
Karen Swallow Prior
And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela's Ring was that it didn't even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt.It was like one person's cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on trough the generations, even after that person was long long dead.
Chris Beckett
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?
Richard Powers
She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and places and things that had gone wrong.
Eloisa James
Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked onto it.
Azar Nafisi
She could stand to think that life’s experiences, good and bad, died with the body, but she couldn’t bear to believe that the dreams vanished too, those exquisite flights of reverie that never actually happened. All those experiences you can have for free. How could they burn and turn to ash? She would disappear one day, too, both her flesh and the woman she dreamed herself to be.
Jill Ciment
No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die,they hide in pairsand read about themselves—in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Craig Raine
All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.
Edward Said
Death is not the enemy living in constant fear of it is.
Norman Cousins
A dragon is a confusion at the heart of things, a law unto himself. He embraces good, evil, and indifference; in his own nature he makes them indivisible and absolute. He knows who he is. Surely you see that... Put it this way. Dragons all love life's finer things- music, art, treasure- the works of the spirit; yet in their personal habits they're foul and bestial- they burn down cathedrals, for instance, and eat maidens- and they see in their whimsical activities no faintest contradiction... Dragons never grow, never change... Believe me, nothing in this world is more despicable than a dragon. They're a walking- or flying- condemnation of all we stand for, all we pray for our children, nay, for ourselves. We struggle to improve ourselves, we tortuously balance on the delicate line between our duties to society and our duties within- our duties to God and our own nature.
John Gardner
The key to successful social behaviour: be approachable and understand the needs of others.
Eraldo Banovac
Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?
T.C. Boyle
More importantly, one could make the opposite argument to Leithart and Grant--that if good is guaranteed to win, then goodness becomes merely a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.
Joseph Laycock
Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another. By covering our bases financially, we escape the pressure to publish half-baked books, sell shoddy art, or launch untested businesses. When
Adam Grant
What is the Christian's responsibility to this world? Is the Christian's responsibility simply, as the "Great Commission" suggests, to share the Good News of God's Kingdom to others, with the goal of making disciples of all nations and perhaps also, along the way, through acts of charity to help meet the material needs of human beings? In other words, is this the only justification for Christian engagement of the larger world?
Dean C.Curry
If enough people repeat the stories for long enough, Jason will become something that cannot die, but he also will have been erased, because the actions are too large and impersonal. The stories will reveal nothing about the real man who lived.
David Vann
Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation.
Mason Cooley
A fit encomium for marital bliss," Beaumont said, putting down his knife and fork. "Dancing to a tune one neither likes nor understands, with a partner who thinks you a cadaver.
Eloisa James
I lie to her. Because this world is not safe. The people who are supposed to protect us, the people we are supposed to trust -- I know that sometimes they are the ones who do the most harm.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
Life is ever since man was born licking honey from a thorn.
Louis Ginsberg
You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.
Anthony M. Esolen
Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
George Saunders
Her death...brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault.
Sheldon Vanauken
True art is by nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies, like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms. As a chemist's experiment tests the laws of nature and dramatically reveals the truth or falsity of scientific hypotheses, moral art tests valyes and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action.
John Gardner
We are always telling stories to ourselves, about ourselves...But we can control those stories...I believe that! Events in our life have meaning because we choose to give it to them
Dan Chaon
The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.
Toni Morrison
There was an end to weeping. Mourning, however, ebbed and surged but never ceased flowing.
Julius Lester
Change is disturbing when it is done to us, exhilarating when it is done by us.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.
David Vann
From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.
David Gross
I need to work on developing a new, less irritable personality. though I suspect that an empty nest would be at least a partial cure, today I resorted to substance abuse.
Eloisa James
Military Veterans have become gang members since the late 1700s.
Carter F. Smith
To the non-combatants and those on the periphery of action, the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement, but to those who entered the meat grinder itself the war was a netherworld of horror from which escape seemed less and less likely as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on. Time had no meaning, life had no meaning. The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss of Peleliu had eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all.
Eugene B. Sledge
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.
Joyce Carol Oates
A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world: to fight it back from himself and those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given that strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness.
Laura Florand
It is often asserted that, in view of the situation in quantum theory, object and subject can no longer be sharply separated. 1 To use Heitler’s words, the ‘separation of the world into an “objective outside reality”, and “us”, the self-conscious onlookers, can no longer be maintained. Object and subject become inseparable from each other’. 2 This, according to Bohr, is due to ‘the impossibility of any sharp separation between the behaviour of atomic objects and the interaction with the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena appear’. 3 Heitler elaborates the point in some detail. ‘One may ask’, he writes, ‘if it is sufficient to carry out a measurement by a self-registering apparatus or whether the presence of an observer is required.’ And he arrives at the conclusion that the self-registering apparatus is insufficient, and that ‘the observer appears, as a necessary part of the whole structure, and in his full capacity as a conscious being’.
Karl R. Popper
The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky..."everything else is a choice.
Karen Thompson Walker
When one door closes another opens but all too often there is a long hallway in between.
Rick Jarow
Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other.
Sheldon Vanauken
You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing an
Junot Díaz
The Light shines brightest, when the world is at its darkest.
Michael Lackey
He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
Gregory Maguire
Life's full of events - they occur and you adjust, you roll and move on. But at some point you realize some events are actually developments. You realize there's a big plan out there you know nothing about, and a development is a first step in that new direction. Sometimes things feel like big-time developmens but in time you adjust, you find a new way and realize they didn't throw you off course, they didn't change you. They were just events. The tricky part is telling the difference between the two.
Adam Johnson