Quotes by Professors - Page 37

I regret to say I'munable to reply to your unexpressed desires.
Harryette Mullen
I think everyone is wounded in their sex,” I said. “I can’t think of one person who isn’t.
André Aciman
In the end,” Callum said, his voice soft, gentle, “it all comes back to you. You protect them [your pack], you love them, you live for them, and someday, you die. That’s what it means, Bryn-girl, to be what we are [to be Alpha]. It’s lonely. It’s impossible. It’s all-consuming.” It is what it is.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Curiosity lies in a hidden corner of the scientific mind.
Eraldo Banovac
Chris is a little ashamed of having once fallen for him: it makes him sad how everything changes, how ruthless the heart can be.
Paul Russell
But i am a black man whose black mama's body and spirit were terrorized by another black man's hands and words. Sexism and patriarchy are not part of the revolution. I am a gender-maneuvering gay black man whose spirit was terrorized by other straight black men. Hetero-sexism and heteronormativity are not a part of our revolution. I am a black man who has ignored the plights of so many of my brothers. Separation because of difference and elitism based on class is not a part of the revolution.
Kiese Laymon
It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened.
Aimee Bender
You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.
Junot Díaz
As it turned out, the sachem had been dead wrong.The Europes neither fled nor died out. In fact, said the old women in charge of the children, he had apologized for this error in prophecy and admitted that however many collapsed from ignorance or disease more would always come. They would come with languages that sounded like a dog bark; with a childish hunger for animal fur. They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred place and worship a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut loose from the earth's soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all orphans they were insatiable. It was their destiny to chew up the world and spit out a horribleness that would destroy all primary peoples.
Toni Morrison
At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.
Gregory Maguire
You have pissed your last in this house . . . and I don't make velvet roses anymore.
Toni Morrison
He evidently did not care that they were in full view of a cluster of dog-owners walking their dogs. He stopped and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately and urgently.
Alexander McCall Smith
Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eighteenth-century Reader’s Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain.” Good books, in contrast, require good readers: “In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.
Karen Swallow Prior
But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.
Junot Díaz
Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
Joyce Carol Oates
I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.
Leslie Jamison
We resonate with one another’s sorrows because we are interconnected. Being whole and simultaneously part of a larger whole, we can change the world simply by changing ourselves. If I become a center of love and kindness in this moment, then in a perhaps small but hardly insignificant way, the world now has a nucleus of love and kindness it lacked the moment before. This benefits me and it benefits others.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Human nature is so complicated. Those who have little, want a lot. Those who have a lot, think others have more. Those who lose, blame others for the loss.
Eraldo Banovac
You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.
Frances Mayes
It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.
Gregory Maguire
What good literature can do and does do—far greater than any importation of morality—is touch the human soul.
Karen Swallow Prior
I think the therapists around this place think that if you know yourself, then somehow you’ll be better and healthier and you’ll be able to leave this place and live out your days as a happy and loving human being. Happy. Loving. I hate those words. I’m supposed to like them. I’m supposed to want them. I don’t. Don’t like them, don’t want them. This is the way I see it: if you get to know yourself really well, you might discover that deep down inside you’re just a dirty, disgusting, and selfish piece of shit. What if my heart is all rotted out and corrupted? What about that? What am I supposed to do with that information? Just tell me that. Most of the time I get the feeling that I’m just an animal disguised as an eighteen-year-old guy. At least I’m hoping that maybe deep down inside I’m a coyote.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!
Alexander McCall Smith
The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness
J. Rufus Fears
I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. I no longer want to believe that these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.
Roxane Gay
If magic was present, it moved under the skin of the world, beneath the ability of human eyes to catch sight of it.
Gregory Maguire
In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.
Mark Mirabello
The sad irony here is that the FDA, which does not regulate fluoride in drinking water, does regulate toothpaste and on the back of a tube of fluoridated toothpaste … it must state that “if your child swallows more than the recommended amount, contact a poison control center.”The amount that they’re talking about, the recommended amount, which is a pea-sized amount, is equivalent to one glass of water.The FDA is not putting a label on the tap saying don’t drink more than one glass of water. If you do, contact a poison center…There is no question that fluoride — not an excessive amount — can cause serious harm.
Paul Connett
Just because they're a story doesn't mean they're not real.
Heather Bouwman
See how forgiving - how brave nature is.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.
Ander Monson
Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.
Rachel Naomi Remen
It wasn't that I wanted to know her now. I wanted to have already known her. I wanted her fears and her desires to have shaped my life. I know this is not love, of course. What it is is a queer feeling of nostalgia for an impossible future, for what can never be. That's fantasy. Love is different.
John Dufresne
So Sonia was not my only or even my first best friend. She was the last. It wasn t that I hadn t made friends since just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn t grant you an exclusive isn t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn t imagine ever living that moment again when you say with a shy and hopeful pride You re my best friend. The other person says it back and there you have chosen each other out of everyone else in the world.
Leah Stewart
Being a parent is joyful, but it's also haunted by the specter of loss.
Richard Beck
However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads.
Robert Hellenga
The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learningof this news, he leaves her for anondisabled woman with a fullerbustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.
Gary Shteyngart
The world was floods above and fire below
Gregory Maguire
And then a throb hits you on the left ide of the head so hard that your head bobs to the right...There's no way that came from inside your head, you think. That's no metaphysical crisis. God just punched you in the face.
Andrew Levy
My heart is beating like it's lonely, like there's nothing else inside of me.
Junot Díaz
We need to make the private public.
Jonah Berger
Time runs independently of us, and we cannot comprehend the flow of time. Time is a category in itself.
Eraldo Banovac
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
Martin Amis
We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.
John Gardner
She knows what it's like to love someone who cannot love you back. Someone who needs you, holds you, yes, but someone who will never know that love is the knife in your heart.
John Dufresne
In order to create you have to believe in your ability to do so and that often means excluding whole chunks of normal life, and, of course, pumping yourself up as much as possible as a way of keeping on. Sort of cheering for yourself in the great football stadium of life.", email dialogue with Cameron Martin, Feb. 09, 2009)
T.C. Boyle
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
As Chris Granger, executive vice president at the NBA, explains, "Talented people are attracted to those who care about them. When you help someone get promoted out of your team, it's a short-term loss, but it's a clear long-term gain. It's easier to attract people, because word gets around that your philosophy is to help people.
Adam Grant
All storytelling is a form of travel. All of the things you know you should do when traveling this world apply in Elfland as well. The Charms will open the doors to strange and wondrous lands, so some travel tips and runic etiquette may be in order: Be polite. Don't take anything without asking. Laugh at their jokes. Remember, humor is sacred: so is hospitality. Beware of the dark woods at night. Do not trust the wolf in winter. Take notes. Sing for your supper. Pack extra sandwiches. Bring fine gifts. Always tell a story when asked. Listen as if your life depended on it. Start early. Walk the land. Keep your eyes open. Travel wisely and well. Come back safe and sound.
Ari Berk
People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives. But while people focus on the story itself, information comes along for the ride.
Jonah Berger
Neither (brother) even glaced at the counter. She smiled. Her dumb brothers never cooked. She didn’t think they even knew how! A human being who needs food to live but cannot prepare that food to eat? Pathetic. In this case, it was an advantage. They weren’t interested in any food until it had been cooked for them.
Nnedi Okorafor
An unsolved problem bothers one's mind, just as a small stone in the shoe,until an idea for solving the problem comes to mind.
Eraldo Banovac
The comment section of the internet is like gang graffiti, it makes no sense and is ugly to look at.
michael p naughton
I want to know everything about you." So he told her. The stars, too, seemed to listen.
Marie Rutkoski
I write-down to speak-up.
M.K. Asante Jr.
Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
....Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.
Craig Werner
It's not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It's just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one's own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one's own mind and body.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Magda was reading a book by a Trappist, in a better mood, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed, fingering my useless map.
Junot Díaz