Quotes by Professors - Page 55

A wise man doesn't start what he doesn't know to do.
Eraldo Banovac
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper. Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properites of making colours darker. Model T is a room with the lock inside -- a key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed. But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves -- in colour, with their eyelids shut.
Craig Raine
But the past is long, and the future is short.
Karen Thompson Walker
I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Her passions were narrow but deep.
Toni Morrison
In a few minutes I heard the books' voices: a low, steady, unsupressible hum. I'd heard it many times before. I've always had a finely tuned ear for a library's accumulations of echo and desire. Libraries are anything but hushed.
Martha Cooley
I would rather believe God doesn't exist than believe he doesn't care.
Eric Wilson
He finally understood...the thing that the people during the Paleolitic Age, freaking 20,000 to 8,000 B.C., were after when they came up with mythologies to do with flight—a desire for the magic of the sky, for something bigger than their feet treading the earth.
Maud Casey
Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.
Francis Spufford
Everyone says,Come to your senses, and I do, of you.Every touch electric, every taste you,every smell, even burning sugar, everycry and laugh. Toothpicked samplesat the farmers’ market, every melon,plum, I come undone, undone.
Dean Young
Literature is the power of fiction itself: not making a claim about what the world is, but about the imagination of a possible world.
Claire Colebrook
Why, could the good man not impose his will, control his wife? asked Mrs. Carew, who always made much of masculine authority in her talk with friends but ruled the roost at home.
Leonard Tourney
The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
But it was women like Rudabeh who planted in my mind the idea of a different kind of woman whose courage is private and personal. Without making any grand claims, without aiming to save humanity or defeat the forces of Satan, these women were engaged in a quiet rebellion, courageous not because it would get them accolades, but because they could not be otherwise. If they were limited and vulnerable, it was an audacious vulnerability, transcending the misogyny of their creator and his times.
Azar Nafisi
Arin, are you all right?""How?" He managed. "How did her arm break?""She fell of a ladder."He must have visibly relaxed, because his cousin raised her brows and looked ready to scold. "I imagined something worse," he tried to explain.She appeared to understand his relief that pain, if it had to come, came this time without malice. Just and accident. Done by no one. The luck, sometimes of life. A bad slip that ends with bread, and someone to bind you.
Marie Rutkoski
I am everything. I am nothing. I am powerful. I am forgotten.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Wanna fly you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Toni Morrison
To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her--is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil...?
Gregory Maguire
If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until you're sixty-five.
Morrie Schwartz
I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?
Adam Johnson
But can't you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I don't mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out. A real home. Not some place you went to and invaded and slaughtered people to get. Not some place you claimed, snatched because you got the guns. Not some place you stole from the people living there, but your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents, past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they were fish, back when God said Good! Good!-- there, right there where you know your own people were born and lived and died. Imagine that, Pat. That place. Who was God talking to if not to my people living in my home?""You preaching, Reverend.""No, I'm talking to you, Pat. I'm talking to you.
Toni Morrison
To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance.
Roxane Gay
My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.
Martin Amis
Fantasies and wishes carry their own significant messages.
Sherry Turkle
Most white Americans were willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security as long as they were the civil liberties of someone else.
Neil Nakadate
Recently I keep thinking that this isn’t about the survival of a species. It’s about why we’re never satisfied with what we need, why we always take a bit more.
Wu Ming-Yi
Having contact sheets for all sorts of episodes in your life seemed to me intriguing and desirable. So much of my own history is beclouded by time, but a few sharp rays, in the form of pictures, falling upon a given day would resuscitate whole contexts. And from this archipelago of moments, scenes, episodes, you could see the larger tectonic movements of your life forming and unforming. You would be reminded of who you are. Or at least of who you were.
Thomas Beller
Time is a most versatile resource. It flies, marches on, works wonders, and will tell. It also runs out.
Kathryn Alesandrini
The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.
Constance Penley
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.
Randy Pausch
The best parenting strives to educate children in how to live -- enthusiastically, compassionately, without greed, striving for a better world.
David R. Wommack
all living creatures are entitled to respect in their own right, not simply because of the utility they may possess for other humans.
Damien Keown
It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.
Aimee Bender
The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.
Patrick Mendis
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.
Toni Morrison
Before we even swung onto 516 Nilda was in my brother's lap and he had his hand so far up her skirt it looked like he was performing a surgical procedure. When we were getting off the bus Rafa pulled me aside and held his hand in front of my nose. Smell this, he said. This is what's wrong with women.
Junot Díaz
The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
George Saunders
Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius.
Thomas C. Foster
You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.
Junot Díaz
But to find out the truth about how dreams die, one should never take the word of the dreamer.
Toni Morrison
Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.
Aimee Bender
The secret of wealth is that workers are systematically underpaid.
Julie Rivkin
Sometimes there is no choice but to walk into your own house. Far away, you think, and you do not want to see. You come home and you say do not tell me. You say, I have hunted the elk all over the snowfields of the Selway, and I do not want to know what happened here. And then there is a morning you walk in and take a look in your own house, like any traveler.
William Kittredge
I would suggest that especially in the differential of images that arise, in the inflections that we find within the representations of women we may also recover a subjectivity for women. For this reason also I am specifically interested in bringing to light other models for women’s roles, models that upset business as usual and offer a greater diversity of possibilities for the ways we can imagine women.
Loriliai Biernacki
The Magical Negro rested his red cane on his shoulder and leisurely strolled into the forest to see if he could find him some hobbits, castles, dragons, princesses, and all that other shit.
Nnedi Okorafor
The people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming; a long outwaiting.
N. Scott Momaday
Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.
Karen Sullivan
Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
John Gardner
She knew Paul D was adding something to her life—something she wanted to count on but was scared to... His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell again. The things neither knew about the other—the things neither had word-shapes for—well, it would come in time.
Toni Morrison
Measurement aside, there are two reasons aggregate growth might matter. The first is to create jobs to assimilate the unemployed and anticipate increases in population. The second is to improve living standards. Economic logic does not require overall expansion to achieve either of these objectives. An expanding labour force can be accommodated if hours of work fall. And it's productivity growth, rather than the overall size of the economy, that drives improvements in living standards. Getting bigger doesn't necessarily yield wealth; improving productivity does.
Juliet Schor
I have always preferred the contemplative to the active life. I prefer the freedom to see matters from several viewpoints, to appreciate ironies, and indeed to change my opinion as I learn something new. To be politically active means to surrender this freedom. I say nothing against activism for others. It is only through the committed that necessary changes come. But each to his own path. [A Cautious Case for Socialism, Dissent Magazine, 1978]
Kenneth J Arrow
Reading...is a full-contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources.
Thomas C. Foster
For Kerouac, the embodiment of American Zen was Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buddhist poet and essayist, who he fictionalized as Japhy Ryder in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a practicing Buddhist and a translator of classic Chinese texts before Kerouac met him. He was the Zen guru of the Beats at the same time that Alan Watts popularized Buddhism for middle-class Americans in best-selling books and magazine articles of the late 1950s. Snyder had studied with Watts for a while but thought him 'square.' 'He was cool in relation to the people around him,' Snyder once said, referring to 'middle class, needy' Americans, but he was 'never actually cool.' Then Snyder added with a wink, '[and] you know what I mean, as the Big Bopper says,' invoking the rock-and-roll classic 'Chantilly Lace' for those hip and in-the-know.
Joel Dinerstein
Oh, miraculous chameleon, science, who can reverse your doctrine hourly and never shake our faith! What cult ever battered by this world of doubt can help but envy you?
Ada Palmer
Sometimes, you know, human kindness just knocks you off your feet.
Hollis Seamon
She sent Amelie to inform Maydrop that she donned an evening dress made of a heavy, supple olive green silk that gleamed under candlelight. It fell from the bodice, but rather than belling out, the silk was cut on the bias and hugged every curve of her body.The bodice was gathered under her breasts and trimmed with dark copper lace that glimmered with shiny black beads. and widened into short sleeves. Her hair was pulled straight back from her forehead without even a wisp floating at her ears, and she waved away the ruby necklace Amelie offered. She wanted no distraction from her face.She did, however, slide a sparkling ruby onto her right hand, a present she had given to herself when Ryburn Weavers made its first thousand guineas in profit.How better to remember that milestone than to wear a sizable percentage it on one's finger?Finally, Amelie drew out a small brush and skillfully applied a few strategic dabs of face paint. The last thing Theo wanted was to try to look conventionally feminine, but she'd discovered that a thin line of kohl made her eyes look deep and mysterious.
Eloisa James
Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created.Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could.
Francis Spufford
Always educate yourself regardless of how old you are.
Eraldo Banovac
I've never stopped wanting to cross the equator, or touch an
Rita Dove