Quotes by Professors - Page 27

But he'll never be fully recognised, because Scots literature these days is all about complaining and moaning and being injured in one's soul.
Alexander McCall Smith
Soon there would be the evening call to prayer and all over Zinder people would be thanking Allah for the gift of one more day, of one more moment in which to live and breathe.
Kathleen Hill
I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?'" 'The way I want it?'" 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?'" 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.'" 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.'" 'Mess it up how?'" 'Forgot it.'" 'Forgot?'" 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.
Toni Morrison
women are Gods, women are the life-breath
Loriliai Biernacki
Problems often become worse if incompetent people try to solve them.
Eraldo Banovac
There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]
Alexander McCall Smith
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silent encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.
Alexander McCall Smith
Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.
Ben Marcus
Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
Azar Nafisi
For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it. How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.
Joyce Carol Oates
Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid.
Leonard Michaels
The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.
Richard M. Rorty
I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.
Roxane Gay
Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
Leslie Jamison
It means, Doug Swieteck, that in this class, you are not your brother.
Gary D. Schmidt
At least when it comes to light pollution what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas.
Paul Bogard
We'd been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
Joyce Carol Oates
Discovering an inner history requires listening – and often not to the first story told.
Sherry Turkle
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.
David Lodge
He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.
Toni Morrison
The thing about fairy tales is that the princess find her prince, but there's usually a price to pay. A compromise is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fair tale is general the one who pays the price. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice.
Roxanne Gay
It is equally important to learn from experience and from books.
Eraldo Banovac
In the morning, people have a plan for that day. Hardworking people think of what they will do during the day, and idle people on what they should do.
Eraldo Banovac
Silence rolled at me, in
Joyce Carol Oates
I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.
Sam Lipsyte
It amazed Forrest that so many men seemed to wake up in the morning needing some kind of beating or another, men saying and doing fantastic things for the sake of getting another man to smash his face.
Matt Bondurant
Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding.
Norman Maclean
Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.
John Kessel
This feeling of lessening disturbance, coming from within myself, unexpected, was profoundly disturbing. As I sat still, growing less and less alarmed by the situation, I knew that I had to move fast, as fast and as far as I could within this small, cramped house.
Alexandra Kleeman
I mean, okay, let's say we're all going to get better. Let's just pretend we will. Fine. Where are we going to go after we get better? What are we going to do with all of our newfound healthy behaviors? Back out into the world that screwed us up and screwed us over. This does not sound promising.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
We should be able to say, "This is my truth," and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot co-exist. Because at some point, doesn't privilege become beside the point?
Roxanne Gay
I think he is the ornament of society! Oh, there is not just one role for the artist in society. He has many roles and he has a different role as society changes, and in different societies . . . He can be a seer at times, and in the eighteenth century he was the satirist, the artist stepping back and holding up the mirror to society. Moreover, I don’t think the same kind of person is necessarily an artist or a poet in one century as another.
Peter Taylor
Inside the human mind, an idea is a mental spark that occurs as a response to the challenge of a train of thought.
Eraldo Banovac
I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes.
Azar Nafisi
What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men.Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms.
Toni Morrison
Any woman who laughs as dope as she does won't ever have trouble finding men.
Junot Díaz
Don't ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn't fall in love, I rose in it.
Toni Morrison
It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.
Gregory Maguire
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
Ben Marcus
Children content with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands. In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign her newborn. Baby, drink milk. Baby, play ball. And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.
Amy Hempel
If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.
J. Budziszewski
For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
You told me that Kafka was not a thinker, and that a "genetic" approach to his work would disclose that much of it was only a kind of very imaginative whining. That was during the period when you were going in for wrecking operations, feeling, I suppose, that the integrity of your own mental processes was best maintained by a series of strong, unforgiving attacks. You made quite an impression on everyone, in those days: you ruffled blouse, you long magenta skirt slit to the knee, the dagger thrust into your boot. "Is that a metaphor?" I asked, pointing to the dagger; you shook your head, smiled, said no.
Donald Barthelme
Before I could turn to look up, a voice boomed from the heavens: "What the heck is going on down there?
Kat Falls
She remembered how her heart, so tight, like a scroll, had opened when Arin kissed her. It had unfurled. If her heart were truly a scroll, she could burn it. It would become a tunnel of flame, a handful of ash. The secrets she had written inside herself would be gone. No one would know
Marie Rutkoski
Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun.
Alexander McCall Smith
One week after New Year's Day in 2006, I was on a flight to Aceh…As we walked down the steps on to the tarmac, the air felt humid and tropical, familiar and almost Balinese. It felt like going home. As the heavy air embraced me, my first inclination was to relax into it, but yet this was not home and my entire body remained on edge.
Alexandra Harris
Before aligning the body to the future, the mind has to straighten out from the impairment or religion.
David L. Lloyd
The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’.
Joyce Carol Oates
It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.
Ben Marcus
We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.
Leslie Jamison
...ultimately it come down to, are you making or are you destroying? If you try very hard to create ways of living, create dreams of what is possible, then you win. If you don't, you may make a fortune in ten years, but you're not going to be read in twenty years, and that's that.
John Gardner
It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
M.H. Abrams
Outside, snow solidified itself into graceful forms. The peace of winter stars seemed permanent.
Toni Morrison
The future is trash. Recycling it, re-arranging it. Making it beautiful again.
Chris Campanioni