Quotes by Professors - Page 58

Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.
Anthony M. Esolen
If you feel it right now, on the Internet, you can tell them right now; you don't have to wait for anything.
Sherry Turkle
Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.
Ben Marcus
Because of language, the thoughts we record today might reach into the future to influence the thinking of people not yet born.
Laura A. Freberg
She felt sad, but she hadn't cried all day. She thought that crying would actually be a good thing right now. It seemed normal to react. Whoever Martin had been, he had probably been a normal person. He was probably having a normal reaction right now, and she had caused it. She felt bad for confusing him. She thought it might be fair to cry for him. But it wasn’t until she thought of the mother cows in the pasture the day after the weaning, wandering around singly in the naked sunshine, still trying to call out in their hoarse, broken voices for the young ones that were still missing, that she was finally able to make herself cry—a little bit for all of the calves, but mostly for herself.
Alexandra Kleeman
Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.
Chris Campanioni
Erase self-doubt by working to build your strengths instead of focusing on your weaknesses.
Rodolfo Costa
The true Renaissance person is endowed with panoramic attention.... The habit of noticing the ensemble of everything and its constituent parts is a matter of will, not of innate aptitude. It involves the conscious noticing of things and the gaps that separate and connect them.
Christy Wampole
I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own? I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]
Amos Oz
Truth can remain silent. Lies must be spoken.
Mason Cooley
If you are doing your best you will not have time to worry about failure.
Robert Hillyer
Power consists to a large extent in deciding what stories will be told.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Ahhh, teaching literature. A noble calling! For we are all stories.
Carolyn Weber
But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.", 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]
T.C. Boyle
Dogs often remind us of the human ail-too human. Cats never.
Mason Cooley
At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
Norman Maclean
I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.
Martin Amis
An idea is an amazing creation of the human mind, which comes either asa result of one's continuous endeavors for solving a certain problem or justas a spark that lights up the considered problem.
Eraldo Banovac
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
Joyce Carol Oates
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
Victor Davis Hanson
Most of the time, it felt like my father and I were completely different species. Possibly literally, depending on the day and whether or not I actually qualified as human at the time.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
To be heartbroken means to have a story
Austin Wright
Rafael?””Yeah?”„Do we all have monsters?”„Yes.”„Why does God give us so many monsters?”„You want to know my theory?”„Sure.”„I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.
Tony Magistrale
I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?
Yusef Komunyakaa
All struggles against oppression in the modern woeld begin by redefining what had previously been consideered private, non-public and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power.
Şeyla Benhabib
Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented.
Alexandra Kleeman
The divorced Indian lady combines every fantasy about the liberated, wicked Western woman with the safety net of basic submissive familiarity.
Bharati Mukherjee
Much of our media now are so image-rich and content-poor that they just serve to capture the eye, manipulate our emotions, and short-circuit our impulses. The propaganda and advertising industries therefore function increasingly like adult obedience industries. They instruct their audiences in how to feel and what to think, and increasing numbers of people seem to accept and follow the cues without question.
Nancy Snow
That sense of contributing to a community is never more rewarding than when you discover something that you believe can improve your readers’ lives by changing what and how they think.
Wayne C. Booth
I felt myself a new species of child. Not a boy (most assuredly) but neither a (mere) girl. That skirt-bound race perpetually moving about serving tea had nothing to do with me. I had such high hopes, you see.The boundaries of the world seemed vast. I would visit Rome, Paris, Constantinople. Underground cafés presented in my mind where, crushed against wet walls, a (handsome, generous) friend and I sat discussing—many things. Deep things, new ideas. Strange green lights shone in the streets, the sea lapped nearby against greasy tilted moorings; there was trouble afoot, a revolution, into which my friend and I must— Well, as is often the case, my hopes were…not realized.
George Saunders
Whatever one of us asked the other to do - it was assumed the asker would weigh all the consequences - the other would do. Thus one might wake the other in the night and ask for a cup of water; and the other would peacefully (and sleepily) fetch it. We, in fact, defined courtesy as 'a cup of water in the night'. And we considered it a very great courtesy to ask for the cup as well as to fetch it.
Sheldon Vanauken
A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.
Norman Cousins
Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.
Paul Russell
The humanity we all share is more important than the mental illnesses we may not
Elyn R. Saks
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help, or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.
George Saunders
His smiling face revealed a love too strong to be kept inside, but the feelings obviously rising inside him kept him from looking directly at Kikunojou. He gazed instead at Kikunojou's clear reflection on the water.
Haruo Shirane
Be bigger presence at work. Race up ladder (joyfully, w/smile on face), get raise. Get in best shape of life, start dressing nicer. Learn guitar? Make point of noticing beauty of world? Why not educate self re. birds, flowers, trees, constellations, become true citizen of natural world, walk around neighborhood w/kids, patiently teaching kids names of birds, flowers, etc. etc.? Why not take kids to Europe? Kids have never been. Have never, in Alps, had hot chocolate in mountain café, served by kindly white- haired innkeeper, who finds them so sophisticated/friendly relative to usual snotty/rich American kids (who always ignore his pretty but crippled daughter w/braids) that he shows them secret hiking path to incredible glade, kids frolic in glade, sit with crippled pretty girl on grass, later say it was most beautiful day of their lives, keep in touch with crippled girl via email, we arrange surgery here for her, surgeon so touched he agrees to do surgery for free, she is on front page of our paper, we are on front page of their paper in Alps? Ha ha.
George Saunders
Carlyle had come fluttering to the flame, lured by the false invitation Dominic had sent in Eloise's name and lured, too, by Eloise's conclusion that J.E.D.D. Mason was something not unlike a miracle. How confident the cousin was that in this golden age of peace and ever watching trackers, a virgin with a bag of gold could walk across this earth without danger. Our modern moths have bounced so many times off light bulbs they aren't prepared for torches and forget that wings can burn.
Ada Palmer
Death is a tragedy whether it is in the death of one girl-woman in London or seventy-seven men, women, and children in Norway. We know this, but perhaps it needs to be said over and over again so we do not forget.I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live in a world where such was the case.
Roxane Gay
Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in the stars but rather closer to the earth her boots stand upon.
Larry Watson
I still love the sound of breaking,the tearing of the page
Dean Young
That is how sin works. Having nothing in itself by which to convince, on what other resources but good and truth can it draw to make itself attractive and plausible? We must use the natural law to recognize the abuse of the natural law; there is nothing else to use.
J. Budziszewski
There was a great deal of progress being made, right under their noses, particularly in Africa, and this progress was good. Life was much harder for tyrants than it had been before.
Alexander McCall Smith
The simple truth is, not every fight can be won.
Elyn R. Saks
Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori--a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as openings. When I first heard the term from a Friend who was counseling me about my resistance to the Vietnam War, I though of how on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, and the memory of its light shines on in the mind.
Scott Russell Sanders
What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors?Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical.
Jill Christman
When asked to contribute ten dollars to a lawyer's funeral I said: "Here's fifty. Bury five of them."
Melvin Helitzer
Every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it
Viet Thanh Nguyen
To me success means effectiveness in the world that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world-that I am able to change it in positive ways.
Maxine Hong Kingston
A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another.
Alexander McCall Smith
I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.
Aimee Bender
The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.
michael p naughton
I no longer want to believe these problems are too complex for us to make sense of them.
Roxane Gay
Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children.
Gary Shteyngart
There is a fascinating entanglement of science and knowledge, which is expressed as scientific knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
When someone loves you, they always think you're beautiful. Those who don't see your beauty can't really see you at all.
Andrea Hurst
Don't just do what is required, do what is respected then, at you'll know, you did the right thing even if it works out wrong.
michael p naughton
It's not easy to kill a mountain goat. He thinks with his spine.
John Gardner
We are all here, all the powers of the Ginen lives for all the centuries that they have been in existence, and we all fight. We change when change is needed. We are a little different in each place that the Ginen have come to rest, and any one of is already many powers. No cancer can fell us all, no blight cover us completely.
Nalo Hopkinson