Quotes by Professors - Page 35

A woman's love for a man is ha;f animal passion and half hate. The more a woman loves a man, the more she hates him. If a man is worth having, he must be a woman's superior; if he is her superior, part of her must hate him. It is only in beauty we surpass you, and it is therefore no wonder that we worship beauty above all else.
Jed Rubenfeld
C.S. Lewis in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. 'Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed by it--how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren't adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.
Sheldon Vanauken
... the object of learning was not to build a better mousetrap but to ask a better question.
Julius Lester
When, despite considerable intelligence, a thinker cannot think straight, it becomes very likely that he cannot face his thoughts.
J. Budziszewski
I try to remember everything, every thing, but sometimes I forget something. I don’t even know what it is sometimes, but I know it’s not coming to me, something about him isn’t coming to me and when that happens, when a piece is missing, it makes me crazy. I don’t know what to do with that.
Adam Berlin
FAMILY. The ties that bind. The cement that builds character, strength of purpose, mutual respect, values.
David R. Wommack
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency.
Louis Menand
The body is not a product. It is an experience.
Daniele Bolelli
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
cheered by the optimism that one sometimes had at the beginning of strenuous exercise, a kind of helium that filled our lungs and carried us along
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Adding your own piece of knowledge to the vast knowledge of the humanrace could be a sufficient reason for having existed.
Eraldo Banovac
I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)
Martin Amis
Any profession of faith…entrusts the mind and heart to a truth that cannot be proven but can be lived.
Luke Timothy Johnson
Democracy, we now know, is more than periodic elections in some countries, such elections have been used to legitimize essentially authoritarian regimes and deprive large parts of the citizenry of basic rights.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
It's too late to leave the future to the futurists.
Sherry Turkle
When fear rules, obedience is the only survival choice.
Toni Morrison
My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
They call each other `E.’ Elvis pickswildflowers near the river and bringsthem to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sportsLevis and western blouses with rhinestones.Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousersand T-shirts, a letterman’s jacket from Tupelo High.They take long walks and often hold hands.She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.Emily’s poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and RichardNixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoonhe will play guitar and sing “I Taste A LiquorNever Brewed” to the tune of “Love Me Tender.”Emily will clap and harmonize. Alonein their cabins later, they’ll listen to the riverand nap. They will not think of Amherstor Las Vegas. They know why God made themroommates. It’s because Americawas their hometown. It’s becauseGod is a thing withoutfeathers. It’s becauseGod wears blue suede shoes.
Hans Ostrom
Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of "playing fair." "Does he? Try making up your own idea of what's fair--say, "giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers"--and see how seriously people take you.
J. Budziszewski
We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all.
Ander Monson
I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
Leslie Jamison
I sort of feel like Cindy Crawford's new husband on their wedding night. I know what's expected of me. I'm just not sure I've got the ability to make it interesting.
Melvin Helitzer
So muchhuman cruelty is simplyincidental is simplybrainless. Simply nocommon sense. You couldtake the entirety of thecommon sense of humansand put it in the palm ofyour hand and still haveroom for your dick.
Anne Carson
Erase from your vocabulary the word “someday.” Do not save things for “special occasions.” Take into account the fact that every day is special. Every day is a gift that we must appreciate and be thankful for. Wear your attractive clothes, wear your nice perfume, use your fine silverware and dishes, and drink from your expensive crystal glasses … just because. Live every day to the fullest and savor every minute of it.
Rodolfo Costa
A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
Frances Mayes
After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.
Steven Millhauser
The real thing about evil… you figure out one side of it - the human side, say - and the eternal side goes into shadow. Or vice versa. The real disaster of this inquiry is that it is the nature of evil to be secret.
Gregory Maguire
Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.
Toni Morrison
Criticism addressed to a person can only be of benefit if it was said in the right way and at the right time.
Eraldo Banovac
Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)
André Aciman
Think of it as a life experience," I mumbled. "Isn't your dad always saying we need more of that?""I don't think prancing around PJ Jamieson's pool in our underwear is exactly what he had in mind.
Jody Gehrman
Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
Sherry Turkle
Smoke, rain, abulia. What can the concerned citizen do to fight the rise of capitalism, in his own community? Study of the tides of conflict and power in a system in which there is structural inequality is an important task. A knowledge of European intellectual history since 1789 provides a useful background. Information theory offers interesting new possibilities. Passion is helpful, especially those types of passion which are non licit. Doubt is a necessary precondition to meaningful action. Fear is the great mover, in the end.
Donald Barthelme
Je suis content que tu aies trouvé ton livre, Steve. Tout le monde y arrive, un jour ou l'autre. Il faut parfois en lire dix, cent ou mille, mais on finit toujours par le dénicher. Enfin, presque toujours. Certains abandonnent avant de l'avoir trouvé, malheureusement...
François Gravel
A deep consideration of the essence of knowledge should reveal how knowledge corresponds to the truth.
Eraldo Banovac
Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognised here: appetite. I recognised it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamiliar. It had forced me to rule out everything else. And there was a second reason for my recognition, which because unprecedented was not recognition at all, but astounding discovery: Martha's face told me. I saw appetite there...
Susan Choi
You can't see both sides of one coin at once, can you, child? The god of money always keeps a secret.The god of money was also the god of spies.
Marie Rutkoski
There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.
Jonny Steinberg
True friendship doesn't include jealousy.
Eraldo Banovac
Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.
Chet Raymo
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.
Aimee Bender
I used to joke that we had prepared ourselves for a time like this by living with Mother. The problem with such a state of affairs was not that you did not get to do what you wanted---sometimes you did---but the effort to appease or resist the reigning deities left you so exhausted that it prevented you from ever really having fun. To this day having fun, just plain enjoying myself, comes at the cost of a conviction that I have committed an undetected crime.
Azar Nafisi
A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.
Larry Watson
Part of dealing with the sense of being cut off - for both the one dying and the one bereaved - is acknowledging that though a vital part of life has changed dramatically, all relationships (with friends, even with you, perhaps) have not.
Sandra L. Bertman
Are we living life, or is life living us?
michael p naughton
Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?""Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.
Gary D. Schmidt
One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.
Bart D. Ehrman
Each day has a color, a smell.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.
Roxane Gay
There is redemption in sadness. It tells me that for nearly five months in 2003, I lived life with the open, raw, refreshing outlook of the young. The payoff, though difficult to quantify, is much greater than I expected. I have no regrets about having gone -- it was the right thing to do. I think about it every day. Sometimes I can hardly believe it happened. I just quit -- and I was on a monumental trip. I didn't suffer financial ruin, my wife didn't leave me, the world didn't stop spinning. I do think of how regrettable it would have been had I ignored the pull that I felt to hike the trail. A wealth of memories could have been lost before they had even occurred if I had dismissed as a whim my inkling to hike. It is disturbing how tenuous our potential is due to our fervent defense of the comfortable norm.
David Miller
She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position.Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where there was an obligation, based on a reasonable expectation, to make a full disclosure. There was no duty to reveal everything in response to a casual question by one who had no right to the information.
Alexander McCall Smith
I had seen the few things I cared about forget me seamlessly. I had seen the life I never really fit into heal up around my absence like a wound scabbed over.
Alexandra Kleeman
If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.
Anthony M. Esolen
Since the human body tends to move in the direction of its expectations-plus or minus-it is important to know that attitudes of confidence and determination are no less a part of the treatment program than medical science and technology.
Norman Cousins
Several themes describe misconceptions about mental illness and corresponding stigmatizing attitudes. Media analyses of film and print have identified three: people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character (29-32). Results of two independent factor analyses of the survey responses of more than 2000 English and American citizens parallel these findings (19,33):- fear and exclusion: persons with severe mental illness should be feared and, therefore, be kept out of most communities;- authoritarianism: persons with severe mental illness are irresponsible, so life decisions should be made by others;- benevolence: persons with severe mental illness are childlike and need to be cared for.- Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36).
Matthew W. Corrigan
You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams.
Junot Díaz
And next time we hear someone saying something like, 'We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,' we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and if he or she does not, we'll feel a bit insane, and therefore less confident, and therefore more passive.
George Saunders
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
They were both from the real world, their own distinct ones, but I was somewhere in limbo. Set apart, I didn't know how to let either of them in.
Amina Gautier