Quotes by Professors - Page 19

Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.
Rachel Naomi Remen
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
My prayer as you read this book is that you will find comfort for the disappointment of unanswered prayer, but also courage to continue on the epic journey that prayer is.
Gerald L. Sittser
Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
There are some secrets so toxic you can’t share. Especially if you love who it is you’d have to share with.
Joyce Carol Oates
An old advertising maxim says you've got to spell out the benefit of the benefit. In other words, people don't buy quarter-inch drill bits. They buy quarter-inch holes so they can hang their children's pictures.
Chip Heath
The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief (...) beautiful.
Gary Shteyngart
So one of my responsibilities, as a white, cis-gendered woman, is to learn how to be a traitor to the 'joys' of patriarchal culture that I experience, however unconsciously.
Erin Wunker
We have Gideon because we don't want always to be speaking of our faith in abstract, otherworldly, irrreal, or general terms, to which people may be glad to listen but don't really take note of; because it is good once in a while actually to see faith in action, not just hear what it should be like, but see how it just happens in the midst of someone's life, in the story of a human being. Only here does faith become, for everyone, not just a children's game, but rather something highly dangerous, even terrifying. Here a person is being treated without considerations or conditions or allowances; he has to bow to what is being asked, or he will be broken. This is why the image of a person of faith is so often that of someone who is not beautiful in human terms, not a harmonious picture, but rather that of someone who has been torn to shreds. The picture of someone who has learned to have faith has the peculiar quality of always pointing away from the person's own self, toward the One in whose power, in whose captivity and bondage he or she is. So we have Gideon, because his story is a story of God glorified, of the human being humbled.
Dean G. Stroud
Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Toni Morrison
Are we really moral monkeys? I don't think so. We only strike the nihilist pose selectively, to put to shame rules we no longer try to keep. When it suits us, we can be quite Puritanical: Right and wrong are in the eye of the beholder, .' The veneer is skeptical, but the core is rigid and punitive. The whole affair looks more like a fence around conduct that cannot bear close examination, than like a serious intellectual position. The whole idea of a moral law is that it binds us whether we like it or not. If it really were just a social convention –< then it wouldn't be morality. >St. Thomas denies that the basic structure of morality is a construct. It is not rooted in human will and power. Rather it is rooted in nature, in structure of creation, in the constitution of the human person – in something we cannot change by human will and power. The good and the right are not things we invent, but things we discover. They are not constructs, but gifts. These gifts are the fount of the law.
J. Budziszewski
She saw how the mind makes forever, in order to store the things it had already lost.
Richard Powers
It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.
Chris Adrian
The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
Norman Cousins
The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.
Melvin Jules Bukiet
Once again I am only who I am.
George Saunders
It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story or reduce it to a phrase or offer it as being a story about any specific person, place, or thing. My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama. Every story is a kind of puzzle. Many have obvious solutions, and some have no solution at all. We write to present questions, sometimes complicated questions, not to offer easy or not-so-easy answers. Do not be misled by the limited vocabulary the American marketplace uses to describe the possibilities for story and drama. If we’re really writing we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate. The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live. No good guys, no bad guys, just guys: that is, people bearing up the crucible of their days and certainly not always—if ever—capable of articulating their condition.
Ron Carlson
The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.
Donald Barthelme
In games, he feels that he is "creating something new." But this is creation where someone has already been. It is not creation but the FEELING of creation. These are feelings of accomplishment on a time scale and with a certainty that the real world cannot provide.
Sherry Turkle
roughly 90 percent of songs have mating as their central theme, and this holds true regardless of cultural setting or historical period.
Gad Saad
By learning to observe without becoming involved, the pattern of stimulus-response which underlies most human behaviour can be broken. Little by little the realisation dawns that one is free to choose how to react in all situations … The grip of long-standing habits is weakened and replaced with a new sense of freedom.
Damien Keown
When your elders are millennia-old demigods, you’d best take the injunction to respect your elders seriously.
Nalo Hopkinson
You get exactly what you want, Anatole’s always suspected, only when you get it it’s no longer what you want, you need something else.
Paul Russell
Toward evening, Harriet found herself thinking the oddest thoughts: that twilight is not really dark. It's gray. The sun gone, the world turns gray, without emotion, without color. It seemed a fitting time for a little girl to slip free of all this pain, to let go.
Eloisa James
Balsa seemed invincible, endowed with powers no other warrior could match, but in her profile he could glimpse the shadow of a young girl, hurt and buffeted by a cruel and hopeless fate. If he had never experienced what it was like to be at the mercy of fate himself, he would not have noticed, but now he could see it with unbearable, heartrending clarity.
Nahoko Uehashi
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape. Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class.
John Williams
Regardless of one’s age, acquiring new knowledge has always been useful.
Eraldo Banovac
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
Joyce Carol Oates
True enemies aren't always the ones who hate each other.
Elie Wiesel
That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.
Harry Crews
As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.
David Morrell
Cognitive insight (knowing something) is not like emotional insight (feeling something). It has no psychodynamic effects. It does not affect the narcissist's behavior patterns, or his interpersonal interactions - the products of well entrenched and rigid defense mechanisms.
Sam Vaknin
A good laugh helps us recognize how ridiculous it is to get excited about matters that are often trivial. . . .
Arthur Asa Berger
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.
Claire Vaye Watkins
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Joyce Carol Oates
Just two people in love.
Christopher Barzak
I missed you more now than I had when I lost you. I was forgetting the bad things faster than I forgot the good, and the changing ratio felt a little bit like falling in love even though I was actually speaking to you less and less.
Alexandra Kleeman
Rereading, we find a new book
Mason Cooley
She was clothed entirely in two large swatches of leather, the leather fake and shiny in a self-mocking way, absolutely correct for 1993, the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream.
Gary Shteyngart
How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it.
Toni Morrison
We should be cautiously open to the spiritual and non-rational, and skeptical of the more invisible magical thinking—what we might call “magical reason”—pervading secular thought and experience in modern society. Science and technology are for most people a new religion, and their orthodoxies are believed with the same fervor.
David Watson
She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.
Sherry Turkle
We stayed all day long. We closed our eyes and paryed, which we had not doen together in a long time. The nurse came in and out of the room. Everything felt awful and I wondered why the whole world didn't seem to notice how bad things really were. I thought of how I'd gotten used to awful, how after my dad died the planets kept on spinning and I got up and ate breakfast every morning and kept going to school. Something happens and it's terrible and you think you can't live another day, but then your mother gets used to it and you get used to it and you both keep on living, and you're not sure if that getting-used-to-things is good or the way life should be.
Margaret McMullan
There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.
Toni Morrison
I have always felt like a pawn... My skin color's been a curse, my missionary parents made me sober and intense, my school days brought me up against political crimes against Animals, my love life imploded and my lover died, and if I had any life's work of my own, I haven't found it yet, except in animal husbandry, if you could call it that.
Gregory Maguire
To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero
Adam Johnson
A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.
George Saunders
Her long body stiffened against him. Her cool fingers tightened in his shaggy fur, and her bare, clinging heels dug deep into his heaving flanks. She was sweet against him, and the clear logic of this new life conquered the dreary conventions of that old, dim existence where he had walked in bitter death.
Jack Williamson
For a scientist, this is a good way to live and die, maybe the ideal way for any of us - excitedly finding we were wrong and excitedly waiting for tomorrow to come so we can start over.
Norman Maclean
A fairy-tale life exists only in fairy tales.
Eraldo Banovac
That was the September I cut school six times in my first two weeks. I just couldn't do school anymore. Something inside wouldn't let me.
Junot Díaz
Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.
Joyce Carol Oates
It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.
Trevanian
Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I’ll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word...
André Aciman
An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question “Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?” These “witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35]
Ross Cheit
But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him "Yero, my hero," and that melted his heart.
Gregory Maguire
They were heading I judged for the Sixth Precinct. Had I had the black hat with me, and sufficient men and horses and lariats and .30-30s, and popular support from the masses and a workable revolutionary ideology and/or a viable myth pattern, I would have rescued them.
Donald Barthelme
Enjoy how sweet how thoughtful how kind I'm being on your birthday. Because tomorrow it's back to the same old crap.
Melvin Helitzer
The men were smashing windows and aiming their weapons through them. The driver had opened the door and was shouting for the women and children to get out and run and hide. But Ilina realized in some vague way that he never managed to actually say the word "hide." He really said, "Women and children, get out, get out, get out! Run and..." The clerk's wife thought it was odd that he had stopped in the middle of a sentence, and even stranger that she herself knew the word, heard the word "hide" in her head when the driver stopped talking.
Clark Zlotchew