Quotes by Professors - Page 49

No one showed any signs of recognizing me. I didn't know what I'd do if they did, other than lie like a devil and pray like a saint.
Rodney Jones
Yoga practice can make us more and more sensitive to subtler and subtler sensations in the body. Paying attention to and staying with finer and finer sensations within the body is one of the surest ways to steady the wandering mind. (39)
Ravi Ravindra
The power of a man is like a bull’s charge, while the power of a woman moves aslant, like a serpent seeking its prey. Know the particular properties of your power. Unless you use it correctly, it won’t get you what you want.” His words perplexed me. Wasn’t power singular and simple? In the world that I knew, men just happened to have more of it. (I hoped to change this.)
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Home is the one place in the world where you are safe from feeling put down or out, unentitled, or unwanted.
Cheryl Mendelson
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
Joyce Carol Oates
I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.
Aimee Bender
[A] new finding shows that while in the 1940s, three-quarters of those surveyed claimed to dream in black and white, today, three-quarters say the opposite, that they dream in color. This reversal is attributed to a change in the number of people who grew up watching color rather than black and white television... another hint that our private dreams are intimately linked to our collective mediated experiences.
Katherine A. Fowkes
Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in face, reading The Onion. We continue to have national and state debates about abortion, birth control, and reproductive freedom, and men, mostly, are directing that debate. That is the stuff of satire.
Roxane Gay
As a purely mathematical fact, people who sleep less live more.
Amy Chua
But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain.
John Williams
Fiction is an ancient virtual reality technology that specializes in simulating human problems.
Jonathan Gottschall
Galinda didn't see the verdant world through the glass of the carriage; she saw her own reflection instead. She had the nearsightedness of youth. She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear yet...She was, after all, on her way to Shiz because she was smart. But there was more than one way to be smart.
Gregory Maguire
The most costly disease is not cancer or coronaries. The most costly disease is boredom - costly for both individual and society.
Norman Cousins
Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.
Elyn R. Saks
Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. "Oh, oh," she managed, "I don't know that I'll see you again- and you remind me so of her.
Gregory Maguire
Don't think you can act perfectly. A perfect person doesn't exist. Always strive to give your best effort, and that's it.
Eraldo Banovac
Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life.
Karen Swallow Prior
Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.
Donald Barthelme
Never lie. Firstly, you will be caught in the lie sooner or later. Secondly, count on problems when repairing the consequences of the lie. Therefore, always tell the truth no matter how unpleasant it is.
Eraldo Banovac
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
Toni Morrison
The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself.
John Williams
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
Information can be harmful when you're not ready for it. ['The Murder Room: The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes']
Richard Walter
The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.
Eric Hobsbawm
Nothing ever tasted any better than a cold beer on a beautiful afternoon with nothing to look forward to but more of the same.
Hugh Hood
When one becomes accustomed to "companionship" without demands, life with people may seem overwhelming. Dependence on a person is risky but it also opens us to deeply knowing another.
Sherry Turkle
Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk. "I have kola," he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest. "Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it," replied Okoye passing back the disc. "No, it is for you, I think," and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepted the honor of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.
Chinua Achebe
Even the disciples, who at times could be dense as bricks, realized that the true neighbor was the one who showed mercy to a stranger.
Scott Russell Sanders
Story is more akin to the lines on your palm. No matter what your fortuneteller claims, the lines are not maps of your future. They are side effects of the flexion of the hand.
Jonathan Gottschall
Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….
Alexander McCall Smith
Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.
Nalo Hopkinson
Like the Biblical Israelites, Americans who are afraid want to put their trust in actors who can effectively protect them, but rather than turning solely to the Lord, modern citizens might choose to put their trust in government experts.
Bethany Albertson
The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn't fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers.She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn't know the name for this is the Prisoner's Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means "show of lights." But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions would not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.
Dana Spiotta
Science is not a collection of facts. Nor is science something that happens in the laboratory. Science happens in the head. It's a flight of imagination beyond the constraints of ordinary perception. Columbus chapter -The Virgin and the Mousetrap
Chet Raymo
Maturity understands that there’s darkness in the world but that there’s no need to dwell in it: we can lighten up and offer illumination to others.
Gina Barreca
I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.
Lance Olsen
Every father and mother who struggle and earn honestly to nurture his children, is also soldier.
Debajyoti Ghosh
All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of theuniverse, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been soclose and yet I had always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I’d met Dante, Ihad fallen in love with him. I just didn’t let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right.And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel
The feeling cannot be described in words, it's mystical; I am changing. Perhaps the soul needed silence so that it can shout to hear the echo from the walls of my heart. It did heard something, Sufism!
Dr. S.U.A.H Syed
There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.
Eric Hobsbawm
Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.
Margaret Lazarus Dean
You are still what you think, despite what others think about you!
Dr. Vivencio Ballano
Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Díaz
Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside
Thomas Nagel
A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
You can't lie a lifetime,son. Either you gon' tell the truth, or the truth's gon' tell on you
Daniel Black
It's tempting to think of red for sun," she said, "but it has to be just a dash, not much. More of a dark orange and a hint of brown. And then white on yellow on white. Not bright white,' she said. 'The kind of white that makes you squint, but in a softer way...''Go look at fire for a while. Go spend some time with fire.'Looking at fire was interesting, I have to admit. I sat with a candle for a couple hours. It has these stages of color: the white, the yellow, the red, the tiny spot of blue I'd heard mentioned but never noticed.
Aimee Bender
To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.
Strunk Jr.
Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.
Gary Shteyngart
Outside, the sleet had gotten thicker. You could hear it pebbling against the large glass windows, you could see it swirling wildly through the spotlights of street lamps. It was the kind of night when you might expect to see a skeleton flying through the air, its ragged black shroud flapping in the wind.
Dan Chaon
Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').
Alexander Nehamas
We must be willing to encounter darkness and despair when they come up and face them, over and over again if need be, without running away or numbing ourselves in the thousands of ways we conjure up to avoid the unavoidable.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Perhaps we were friends first and lovers second.But then perhaps this is what lovers are.
André Aciman
Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
The crisis besetting America is not just an economic or political crisis; something deeper is wreaking havoc across the land, a mercenary and utilitarian attitude that demonstrates little empathy for people's actual well-being, that dismisses imagination and thought, branding passion for knowledge as irrelevant.
Azar Nafisi
You see, the world is as big as an elephant or small as a grain of sand, depending on you. You can let it stomp you, gore you, swallow you up. Or you can let it slip into your shell and turn into a pearl.” -- Benjamin East
Jonathan Freedman
Has anyone sen Mr Snark " "I saw him in the tunnel about 15 minutes ago." "Oh no " wailed Dr Ferman "he will have been atomised." "Oh dear" muttered an MP. "Bye-election.
Alexander McCall Smith
The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking
Marvin Bell