Quotes by Professors - Page 51

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning.
Elie Wiesel
I’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That’s me.A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another day without his presence, her heart beat like a gloved fist against her ribs. And in the morning, long before she was fully awake, she felt a longing so bitter and tight it yanked her out of a sleep swept clean of dreams.
Toni Morrison
America, to me, should be shouting all the time, a bunch of shouting voices, most of them wrong, some of them nuts, but please, not just one droning glamourous reasonable voice.
George Saunders
I want to make a difference. But get a job? I worry that will make the ordinary, like everybody else.
Claire Messud
For Christians, especially postmodern Christians bereft of any consensus, sexual difference is a similar category. We will not know what it means until we allow God to tell us what it means. The tradition has claimed that we do not know who we are and what it means to find ourselves differentiated as men and women until we allow the premises and practices of revelation to unfold. In the tradition, stretching from Augustine to John Paul II, sexual difference is not mute, inert, nonexistent, or indifferent. In this tradition, God brings man to woman and tells the two sexes something they would not otherwise know: that their creation is good, that their creation as two sexes is for the sake of enabling a church and a covenant, and that, despite their fallenness, their twoness can in itself become a witness to reconciliation and redemption through marriage. Marriage gives this aspect of our creation the power to testify, and the nonmarried offer supporting testimony through their chastity, which creates the social ecology supporting marriage.
Christopher C. Roberts
Language itself is a major resource in the naming of what cannot be named
David Simpson
We can all participate in the heritage of man. We all can help to preserve it. And we can all make our own modest contribution to it.We must not as for more.
Karl R. Popper
Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.
Mark Mirabello
But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.
Timothy Schaffert
For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear.
Jed Rubenfeld
People that are lazy don't get anything accomplished. It's People like me that are reliable.
Richard W. Todd
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, l
Anne Carson
If anger were mileage, I'd be a very frequent flyer, right up there in First Class.
Gina Barreca
Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
Aimee Bender
A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.
Joyce Carol Oates
Like Wollstonecraft, Austen rejects the notion that ‘man was made to reason, woman to feel.’ Perhaps Austen was tired of reading passages in conduct books suggesting that young women were innately sensitive, quivering, emotional messes.
Emily Auerbach
He would never again need anything from his mother and father but their love.
Frederick Drimmer
That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind
Neil Armstrong
How they madeout of shamelessness somethingbeautiful, for as long as they could.
Carl Phillips
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure--as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
John Williams
It is certain that there is no limit to the vast ocean of knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
God doesn't want your careful virtue, He wants your reckless generosity.
Francis Spufford
A young woman faces the decision of whether to marry a certain man whom she loves but who has deeply rooted, traditional ideas concerning marriage, family life, and the roles of men and women in each. A sober assessment of her future tell the woman that each of the two alternatives offers real but contrasting goods. One life offers the possibility of a greater degree of personal independence, the chance to pursue a career, perhaps more risk and adventure, while the other offers the rewards of parenting, stability, and a life together with a man whom, after all, she is in love with. In order to choose in a self-determined mode the woman must realize that the decision she faces involves more than the choice between two particular actions; it is also a choice between two distinct identities. In posing the questions "Who am I? Which of the two lives is really me?" she asks herself not a factual question about her identity but a fundamental practical question about the relative values of distinct and incommensurable goods. The point I take to be implicit in Tugendhat's (and Fichte's) view of the practical subject is that it would be mistaken to suppose that the woman had at her disposal an already established hierarchy of values that she must simply consult in order to decide whether to marry. Rather, her decision, if self-determined, must proceed from a ranking of values that emerges only in the process of reflecting upon the kind of person she wants to be.
Frederick Neuhouser
It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.
Katie Roiphe
Maude regards the ones who don't make it as her own personal failures. "I guess I didn't put enough emphasis on 'until death do you part,'" she says sourly, whenever she hears about the latest divorce. "Sad to say, but some are in it just for the good times. Married folks, they gotta be like that cat's claw acacia I've got growin' in my yard. Gotta grab hard and hold on tight when the going gets rough. Only way to get through the bad times. Grab hard, hold on, and ride. No matter what.
Susan Wittig Albert
It is nonsense to say there is not enough time to be fully informed. ... Time given to thought is the greatest timesaver of all.
Norman Cousins
It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories.
Jack D. Zipes
Friends disappear or they are powerless. This is what misfortune meansan acid test of friendship.I wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Anne Carson
Not like the me was some tough somebody, or somebody she had put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn't have to feel sorry for or have to fight for. -Felice
Toni Morrison
The best thing she was, was her children.
Toni Morrison
I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I’m not with them I don’t have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.
Joyce Carol Oates
Having an open mind is the most important precondition for creatingnew ideas.
Eraldo Banovac
Laboratory research suggests that how we look and act in the virtual affect our behavior in the real.
Sherry Turkle
The recipe for each child is just for that child, even if it is the same mother and father.
Alexander McCall Smith
Never deny a diagnosis but do deny the negative verdict that may go with it.
Norman Cousins
If a dog can love us unconditionally, why can't we love each other in the same way?
Carol McKibben
Our knowledge can only be finite while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Karl Popper
A wise man does not give quick answers to complex questions – he observes, analyzes and contemplates.
Eraldo Banovac
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.
Neil Armstrong
This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.
Marcel Danesi
All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.
Steven Millhauser
It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.
Andrew Solomon
Being blinded in love and friendship is a common mistake.
Eraldo Banovac
This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.
David Vann
Three people marooned on a desert island would soon reinvent politics.
Mason Cooley
A civilian-based diplomacy supports noncommercial, nonprofit, and publicly-subsidized media to counteract the corporate-controlled, for-profit, private media that dominate political discourse; and works to place media control, ownership, and lobbying at the center of public policy debate.
Nancy Snow
OKAY. So I was going to the library every Saturday. So what? So what? It's not like I was reading books or anything.
Gary D. Schmidt
Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. A the same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope).
Jon Kabat-Zinn
In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.
Justus von Liebig
She looked at the boy. He knew her weakness for storytelling. And it was, after all, only a story. Still, she wished he had chosen a happier one.
Marie Rutkoski
Just because somebody smiles when he hands me a bag of shit, that doesn't mean I have to take it. I don't give a damn how friendly he is. It's what he does that matters.
David Morrell
However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…
Alexander McCall Smith
A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.
Sherry Turkle
Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.
Gary Shteyngart
…it was not whim or wildness which made me go, but a sudden clear realization that tho you were the first man of importance to me, you could not be the last. — Gwendolyn MacEwen to Milton Acorn, 1963 (age 21)
Jeanette Lynes
In a time of destruction, create something.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson