Quotes by Professors - Page 26

I treat my writing life like a fabulous, enchanting lover, because that is what it is to me. Something that is terribly time consuming, delicious and time-stopping. I have missed important meetings for love, and I will continue to put my writing life in the same position. My writing life is the lover at the center, not the neglected cranky demanding millstone, my ball and chain.When you are love, truly and passionately, you don't have to write down in your daily schedule "Spend quality time with Lover today. You can't not.
Heather Sellers
people still fall in love, and out, yes, in and out, and out and in, and they please each other, and hurt each other, isn't that the truth, and they do these things in more or less conventionally dramatic fashion, unfashionable or not, go on, I'm going, and what goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world
John Barth
Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.
Edward Said
When I am running I inhabit and exit my body in the same moment. I bear witness to the harshest of physical sensations, even while I feel myself flying free and away. I do not want to remember what has happened to me. I do not want to reflect on the past. I can't in a way. I'm not made for regrets.
Carrie Snyder
When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad's bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of looking for Easter eggs. In my house, Easter lasted forever.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
One gets the sense that, for Deleuze, the cinema of the movement-image has been fully realized while that of the time-image is emergent. Comparatively speaking, there are few "pure" examples of films where direct images of time predominate. Mixed or hybrid examples are more common.
D. N. Rodowick
Here, drink your liqueur," Henry said, tossing back her drink. "I carry it with me everywhere because it's the only kind of drink that Leo doesn't like, so there's a chance I'll still have some tomorrow.
Eloisa James
Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love your own.
Junot Díaz
The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.
Chip Heath
Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.
Alexander McCall Smith
Fillmore lost his party’s nomination the next year to yet another military hero, General Winfield 'Old Fuss and Feathers' Scott, an anti-slavery candidate who then lost the election to General Franklin Pierce (whose party’s slogan was 'We Polked you in 1844; we shall Pierce you in 1852').
Steven A. Seidman
It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.
Eric Hobsbawm
Empathize with others. You may easily get into a situation where you need the understanding of others.
Eraldo Banovac
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Albert A. Bartlett
In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
Junot Díaz
Waiting in the reception area, she had flicked through a news magazine that had been lying on the table for clients to read while waiting for their appointment. On the cover there had been a picture of a well-known politician, a man famous for his rudeness and aggression. She had looked at the eyes--the piercing, accusing eyes, and had seen only an impenetrable, defensive anger. Nothing--no forced smiles nor rehearsed protestation of concern, could cancel out the cold selfishness of those eyes.
Alexander McCall Smith
She loathed her profile almost as much as she loathed the dress. If she didn't have to worry about people mistaking her for a boy--- not that they really did, but they couldn't stop remarking on the resemblance; at any rate, if she didn't have to worry about that--- she would never again wear pink. Or pearls. There was something dreadfully banal about the way the pearls shimmered.For a moment she distracted herself by mentally ripping her dress apart, stripping it of its ruffles and pearls and tiny sleeves. Given a choice, she would dress in plum-colored silk and sleek her hair away from her face without a single flyaway curl. Her only hair adornment would be an enormous feather--- a black one--- arching backward so it brushed her shoulder. If her sleeves were elbow-length, she could trim them with a narrow edging of black fur. Or perhaps swansdown, with the same at the neck. Or she could put a feather trim at the neck; the white would look shocking against the plum velvet.That led to the idea that she could put a ruff at the neck and trim that with a narrow strip of swansdown,. It would be even better if the sleeves weren't opaque fabric but nearly transparent, like that new Indian silk her friend Lucinda had been wearing the previous night, and she would have them quite wide, so they billowed and gathered tight at the elbow. Or perhaps the wrist would be more dramatic....
Eloisa James
By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
I'm fat," she blurted out. "You are not fat. You're the most beautiful, voluptuous woman I know." His eyes moved down her body, deliberately, slowly, then back up to her face. What she saw in them sent fire squirming through her stomach and lower."I want every inch of you," he said, growling it. "I want to fall on my knees and worship at your hips." He reach out, shaped her curves from breast to hips with a burning sweep of his hand that a man was allowed to give only his wife.
Eloisa James
And meanwhile time goes about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.
Martin Amis
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
In the transformed world political context of today, it is more essential than ever that the critique of democracy in the name of difference developed by oppositional intellectuals be formulated so carefully that these thoughts cannot be exploited for nationalist, tribalist, and xenophobic purposes. It is imperative that the politics of the 'differend' not be settled beyond and at the margins of democratic politics.
Şeyla Benhabib
Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting.
Azar Nafisi
Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.
Joyce Carol Oates
Make it so obvious even a computer couldn't be confused.
Jeff Jarvis
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Hugh MacLennan
Set loose, a child would run down the paths, scramble up the rocks, lie on the earth. Grown-ups more often let their minds do the running, scrambling, and lying, but the emotion is shared. It feels good to be here.
David Miller
How can you possibly reconcile the great inequities of gender – coupled with the perversions of age and the randomness of everything?
Kate Walbert
Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.
Junot Díaz
She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy.
Junot Díaz
...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expecting us to believe there isn't a special creation of God, or of man, to which we didn't belong, here in the shabby south end of Hammond in the worst damn public school in the district, we didn't belong and never would. And what the hell? ---Such truths, FOXFIRE made softer.
Joyce Carol Oates
Things don't happen for a reason, we make reasons out of things that happen.
michael p naughton
If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225)
André Aciman
How can we read when people need our help? It's a luxury. A stupid luxury.
Gary Shteyngart
On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.
Alex Shakar
The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps.
Chris Campanioni
When you're hurting, you hurt yourself.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
It is hard, she thought, it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hatred of others.
Alexander McCall Smith
Within this historic and optimistic future in mind, I have made no value judgment of the destiny bestowed on each nation. For all this, however, leadership matters; so do the institutional structures and the system of political governance.
Patrick Mendis
It dropped ice to the bottom of his stomach. He thought of the ruined bodies he'd seen, including the ones he himself had ruined. He realized that he had somehow expected that he'd never have to think again about the way people damage other people. The night of the invasion. Kestrel's back. His own. Roshar's scarred face. His own.
Marie Rutkoski
Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.
J. Budziszewski
Don't be afraid to study hard: knowledge never exhausts the mind.
Eraldo Banovac
Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.
Elyn R. Saks
We shared a daughter? I'd not thought about it that way before. If we shared a daughter, and something happened to Claire, then I would not have to hare Esther with her anymore. I would have Esther to myself.
Ben Marcus
Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Simply put: Epistemic games recreate in game form the things that people do in the real world to learn to think in innovative and creative ways about problems that matter.
David Williamson Shaffer
The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival
Richard Powers
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
Thomas C. Foster
Our best moral stories don’t tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We’re not supposed to have it handed to us.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
Theo shook out the half square of heavy silk. "It will make all the difference to this insipid gown." With one sharp wrench she pulled out the lace fichu tucked into her bodice and replaced it with the scarf. It flashed raspberry red against the almond-colored muslin of her gown.
Eloisa James
The truth is that there is almost nothing as tiresome as unwanted love.
Sheila Kohler
A man can lead a reasonably full life without a family, a fixed local residence, or a religious affiliation, but if he is stateless he is nothing. He has no rights, no security, and little opportunity for a useful career. There is no salvation on earth outside the framework of an organized state.
Joseph Reese Strayer
Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.
Alexander McCall Smith
Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image o
Eleanore Stump
Be the competition you wish to see in the world.
michael p naughton
When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.
John C. Bean
Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.
Andrew Solomon
Someone was waving a large pink-and-white sign that read, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." I was trying, and so were at least thirty thousand other bodies, with varying degrees of post-Aquarian patience, to see the Who for the first time in a year.
Ellen Willis
The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.
Azar Nafisi
He makes an effort to be more spontaneous on Facebook.
Sherry Turkle