Quotes by Professors - Page 50

Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very process of conceiving new human life. Perhaps centuries from now scholars and historians will be classifying them as 'sterility cults.
Merlin Stone
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
Continuously feeling superior is a characteristic of immaturity.
Eraldo Banovac
I myself," said Gibbon, "am slightly underdone in the personal worthlessness line. It was Papa's fault. He used no irony. The communications mix offered by the parent to the child is as you know twelve percent do this, eighty-two percent don't do that, and six percent huggles and endearments. That is standard. Now, to avoid boring himself or herself to death during this monition the parent enlivens the discourse with wit, usually irony of the cheaper sort. The irony ambigufies the message, but more importantly establishes in the child the sense of personal lack-of-worth. Because the child understands that one who is talked to in this way is not much of a something. Ten years of it goes a long way. Fifteen is better. That is where Pap fell down. He eschewed irony.
Donald Barthelme
Each type of knowledge has value; however, from an engineering point of view, practical knowledge seems to be more valuable than theoretical knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
There is no better way to improve yourself than an exchange of ideaswith peers.
Eraldo Banovac
In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn't know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates & said I was the affirmative-action student...Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she & maybe others saw me hurt real bad...I stopped joking about being a slacker. I tripled the number of projects I was involved with. I was excellent most of the time. I fell short some of the time. I made sure I got good grades. I made sure my comprehensive exams were solid. I wrote conference proposals & had them accepted. I published. I designed an overly ambitious research project for my dissertation that kind of made me want to die. No matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.
Roxane Gay
Write at the edges of the day.
Toni Morrison
To treat fiction as if it were a religious or moral sermon is about as far from the actuality of literature as it is possible to get and indeed it is, in my opinion, the purest form of intellectual barbarism.
Edward Said
As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated.If they make it that far.
Candy Schulman
Ours is a shockingly dead view of creation. We ourselves are the only things in the universe to which we grant an authentic vitality, and because of this we are not fully alive.
Frederick Turner
Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it.
Alexander McCall Smith
That is what revolutionaries do. We sacrifice ourselves to save others.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Don’t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if it’s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that’s almost the same thing.
Gregory Maguire
With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of.
Alex Shakar
You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.
Aimee Bender
I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.So I renamed myself Ari.If I switched the letter, my name was Air.I thought it might be a great thing to be the air.I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
You're born thinking you're the centre of things, and they chip away at that until you expire muttering If I knew then, or some nonsense in an empty rooming house.
Mark Anthony Jarman
Critical to the fight against global terrorism is an ability to move beyond presuppositions and stereotypes in our attitudes and policies and to form partnerships that transcend an "us" and "them" view of the world. (p. 135)
John L. Esposito
Winter, I wrote, was akin to living inside a refrigerator.
Okey Ndibe
Did one learn or was one shaped?
Paul Russell
Choosing life is always messy. But it is there in the messiness, in the conflicted and often confused ways we live our lives, that we can learn how much mercy matters to us all.
Mathew N. Schmalz
We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.
John Dufresne
The development of civilization was marked by constant changes. This will continue – therefore, the future will belong to people ready for change.
Eraldo Banovac
See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!
Toni Morrison
While it is better to be loved than hated, it is also far better to be hated than ignored.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
This was in the good old days, when monsters were fantasy.
Hollis Seamon
History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.
Joshua Clover
Bethany blinked. "Did you just hit me?" she asked, disbelief coloring her every feature.Skylar raised both hands, palms outward. "I come in peace!""You do not come in peace. You hit me.""I hit in peace!
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there.
Roxane Gay
With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced.
Martha Cooley
She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.
Gary Shteyngart
Regarding vengeance and arch-enemies, one must not only be timely but prideful, and pride exacts propriety.
Adam Levin
There’s always that first step in skating, from dry ground to slick ice, when it just seems impossible. Impossible that two thin blades of metal will support you, impossible that because its molecules have begun to dance a little slower water will hold you up.
Carol Goodman
A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.
Alexander McCall Smith
A happy man doesn't reconsider life.
Eraldo Banovac
Wherever you work, work hard and educate yourself continuously. You must never forget social welfare, ethics and honesty. However, there is no guarantee for your career progression. Therefore, don't expect that only the best people will be promoted.
Eraldo Banovac
For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of the human body, the very phenomenon of the human body, is intimately linked to "the problems of painting": "Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn't these [correspondences] in turn give rise to some [external] visible shape in which anyone else would recognize those motifs which support his own inspection of the world?" Painting brings forth a carnal visuality, an embodied and incarnate image, by establishing the internal equivalent ("in me") of the outside world, which is made of the "same stuff." I am an extension of the world, but the world extends, intensifies, forms a "line of intensity," to use Gilles Deleuze's idiom, inside me. The world forms a "strange system of exchanges" with me; I am constituted in an exchange with the world. Painting makes this continuity visible, is itself the visualization of this continuity, of this blending of the inside and out. Images—"designs" and "paintings"—says Merleau-Ponty, are "the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of feeling makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary.
Akira Mizuta Lippit
Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.
Jeff Jarvis
He must shape simultaneously (in an expanding creative moment) his characters, plot, and setting, each inextricably connected to the others; he must make his whole world in a single, coherent gesture, as a potter makes a pot...
John Gardner
Storytelling is among the oldest forms of communication. Storytelling is the commonality of all human beings, in allplaces, in all times.
Rives Collins
They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.
Alexander McCall Smith
Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
Thomas C. Foster
I have argued elsewhere (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence [2005]) that we need to treat ethics in biblical texts just as we treat ethics in any other works of ancient literature. It is a vacuous exercise to pick and choose which atrocities were really ordained by any gods and which were not. We should have a zero-tolerance view of any text or collection of texts that at any time endorses genocide, misogyny, and other atrocities. We always judge ancient texts by modern ethical standards, and the Bible should not be treated differently.
Hector Avalos
Like a white knight in a station wagon, he drove out of her life.
Andrea Hurst
Monotheism generally allows for no greys. Ideas are either true or false. Hence, although science develops out of the alchemy of the medieval Christian milieu (derived from Arabic alchemy, which was stimulated by the much earlier Chinese alchemy), science is not understood by the nonscientific monotheistic population. The general Western public mistakenly thinks science presents unalterable truth, as does their religion, rather than theories to be tested and continually discarded to be replaced by new hypotheses, which is the actual scientific method.
Jordan D. Paper
Superficial people consider themselves capable of doing everything. The question, however, is who is willing to hire them?
Eraldo Banovac
The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader." - Quoting Derek Sivers
Adam M. Grant
I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.
Alexander Nehamas
I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
What?" The dread in her tone told Rob she knew what. "How much longer?""Thirty seconds."She laughed with a panicked urgency. "I just tried to nod. I can't feel my body, but I keep reaching for it, you know?"Rob nodded, feeling guilty he was able to."How about this? I'll just tell you when I'm nodding, or shaking my head, or punching you.""Oh, no," Rob laughed, "are you planning on punching me often?""We'll see."Rob couldn't help glancing at the timer, though he knew it would only make Winter more aware of what was about to happen. Seven seconds."I keep expecting this to get easier, taht it will start to feel as if I'm going to sleep. But it doesn't. Maybe it's not possible to get used to dying."Rob reached out to comfort her, then remembered it was forbidden and drew back. If not for the surveillance, Rob would have reached under the silver cover and taken her hand, cold and stiff as it would have been.
Will McIntosh
The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.
Cathy Caruth
In an age when mass pleasures like television are becoming more feeble and homogeneous, the very act of discrimination becomes a form of protest. At a time when mass marketing of food produces a product so disgusting that it has to be wrapped in distracting gimmicks to be sold, the mere fact of paying attention to what you eat and drink and telling the truth about taste is a revolutionary act.
Lynn Hoffman
Do not criticize others unless you are willing to accept criticism.
Eraldo Banovac
Happy the man who knows his duties!
Christian Furchtegott Gellert
We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.
Leslie Jamison
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it.
Gregory Maguire
Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.
Junot Díaz
If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.
Jack D. Zipes