Quotes by Professors - Page 60

Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed," she said, "and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.
Toni Morrison
I'm turning you into a girlchasing a butterfly, a she-wolfon a hilltop, & then back into a woman.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.
Thomas C. Foster
He was a man with a chest, and he wanted to give thoughtful expression to the passion of his heart.
Harvey Mansfield
I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginningwhat couldn't happen. What couldn't
Frank Bidart
When I was a child I truly loved:Unthinking love as calm and deepAs the North Sea. But I have lived,And now I do not sleep.
John Gardner
The first problem of communication is getting people's attention.
Chip Heath
Survival is triumph enough.
Harry Crews
War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace.
Norman Cousins
Changing the way LGBTQ individualswith chronic or life-limiting illnesses are cared for requires a paradigm shift in the way we (collectively, as health care professionals) approach the conversation about what it means to be inclusive in our compassion. You don’t need to change your religious or moral beliefs to provide good care to LGBTQ individuals.
Kimberly D. Acquaviva
Women invented misery, but we don't understand it.
Rita Dove
The Japanese fought to win - it was a savage, brutal, inhumane, exhausting and dirty business. Our commanders knew that if we were to win and survive, we must be trained realistically for it whether we liked it or not. In the post-war years, the U.S. Marine Corps came in for a great deal of undeserved criticism in my opinion, from well-meaning persons who did not comprehend the magnitude of stress and horror that combat can be. The technology that developed the rifle barrel, the machine gun and high explosive shells has turned war into prolonged, subhuman slaughter. Men must be trained realistically if they are to survive it without breaking, mentally and physically.
Eugene B. Sledge
A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.
Joyce Carol Oates
The passion for such children contains no ego motive of anticipated reciprocity; one is choosing against, in the poet Richard Wilbur's phrase, 'loving things for reasons'. You find beauty and hope in the existence, rather than the achievements, of such a child. Most parenthood entails some struggle to change, educate and improve one's children; people with multiple severe disabilities may not become anything else, and there is a compelling purity in parental engagement not with what might or should or will be, but with, simply, what is.
Andrew Solomon
He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.
Alexander McCall Smith
It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.
Joyce Carol Oates
the hope is that laying out what we understand about essential differences in the minds of men and women may lead to grater acceptance and respect of difference.
Simon Baron-Cohen
There is really nothing more to say-except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
Toni Morrison
Superficial knowledge is potentially more dangerous than ignorance. It gives a false sense of security encouraging an ignorant man to persevere in his efforts that can result in huge damage.
Eraldo Banovac
My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.
Gary Shteyngart
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
Louise DeSalvo
Ad we interviewing each other?Something like that.What position am I applying for?Best friend.I thought I already had the job.Don't be so sure, you arrogant son of a bitch.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.
Andrew J. Bacevich
Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]
Toni Morrison
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.
Toni Morrison
And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?
Alexander McCall Smith
… mess is the material from which life and creativity are built …
Ralph D. Stacey
As Pacific Ocean nations, competition and cooperation between the two nations will create a new atmosphere—leading to the Birth of a ‘Pacific’ New World Order—that is more engaging and less confrontational; this can be characterized by the presence of force without war.
Patrick Mendis
President George Washington’s namesake capital, once a marketplace for slave auctions, is now synonymous with democracy and freedom; so is the iconic Jefferson, who wanted to build an “Empire of Liberty” for the world.
Patrick Mendis
Maybe this is as near as we can come to forgiveness. Not the past wiped away, nothing undone, but some willingness in the present, some recognition and embrace and slowing down.
David Vann
...there was a natural comorbidity between sexual appetite and sexual jealousy, between the desire to fuck and the desire to kill.
M. Thomas Gammarino
Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.
Chinua Achebe
She is dead now, so I can say that she laughed like us, played like us and her adult life turned out okay- so I heard. But then when we were all twelve or less, it seemed as though she floated behind a scrim. Markedly pretty, she had eyes full of distance- a smile made more attractive by what it withheld; some knowingness it appeared unwilling to share. In the early forties "cool" was our word to describe her, although, at the time, I thought she was simply sad. Something treasured had been irretrievably lost, and there was nothing to be done about it. Her attitude reminded me of what I saw in the eyes of scary old people sitting in rocking chairs on the porch or leaning forward on a fence looking at us as though in a little while we would know the doom and catastrophe they already knew. "Uh huh", they murmured when we tripped over the door saddle or ruined our clothes. "where is your mind" they asked when we dropped the milk bottle, let the coal fire go out. Seriously asking a serious question, they showed no surprise. They knew we would always fall down, drop things, be ruined, and forget. And it was possible to lose your mind. She too seemed aware of our haplessness, but she did not wear their frown. A mournful sympathy infected her smile.
Toni Morrison
The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls...lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon.
Philip W. Comfort
There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.
N. Scott Momaday
Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar homeland should inspire you to allow other people to embrace their homelands as beautiful too.
Gregory Maguire
You are not the writer. You are the story being told from The Writer.
Richard Wisniewski
…there is faith and faith. One form of faith is actual practice—the rituals and so on—the other form of faith involves actually believing in it.
Alexander McCall Smith
Most days I live awed by the world we have still, rather than mourning the worlds we have lost. The bandit mask of a cedar waxwing on a bare branch a few feet away; the clear bright sun of a frozen winter noon; the rise of Orion in the eastern evening sky-every day, every night, I give thanks for another chance to notice. I see beauty everywhere; so much beauty I often speak it aloud. So much beauty I often laugh, and my day is made.Still if you wanted to, I think, you could feel sadness without end. I’m not even talking about hungry children or domestic violence or endless wars between supposedly grown men…but ‘you mustn’t be frightened if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you even seen,' said Rilke, 'you must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in it hand and will not let you fall.
Paul Bogard
There are no gods, only men.
David Vann
Two things influence one's wisdom: remarkable experience and – evenmuch more – accumulated knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.
Luke Rhinehart
The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.
Marie Rutkoski
Often, when I read the news, I have to make sure I am not, in fact, 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
Suppose someone were to describe a small country that provided free education through university for all of its citizens, transportation for schoolchildren, and free health care - including heart surgery - for all. You might suspect that a country is either phenomenally rich or on the fast track to fiscal crisis.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not.
André Brink
…did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.
Alexander McCall Smith
That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.
Richard Mitchell
In a Fisherian world, animals are slaves to evolutionary fashion, evolving extravagant and arbitrary displays and tastes that are all "meaningless"; they do not involve anything other than perceived qualities.
Richard O. Prum
It is much more challenging to accept those who know a lot than those who know little.
Eraldo Banovac
Rather than looking outward in an attempt to predict the outcome, you turn inward to your identity. You base the decision on who you are--or who you want to be.
Adam Grant
Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.            *I abjure advice-giver.
Frank Bidart
Although some organizations today may survive and prosper because they have intu- itive geniuses managing them, most are not so fortunate. Most organizations can benefit from strategic management, which is based upon integrating intuition and analysis in decision making. Choosing an intuitive or analytic approach to decision making is not an either–or proposition. Managers at all levels in an organization inject their intuition and judgment into strategic-management analyses. Analytical thinking and intuitive thinking complement each other. Operating from the I’ve-already-made-up-my-mind-don’t-bother-me-with-the-facts mode is not management by intuition; it is management by ignorance. Drucker says, “I believe in intuition only if you discipline it. ‘Hunch’ artists, who make a diagnosis but don’t check it out with the facts, are the ones in medicine who kill people, and in management kill businesses.
Fred R. David
To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.
Leah Stewart
They have to say SOMETHING. Maria Bartiromo can't exactly look into the camera and say that the Dow is down half a percent today because of random Brownian motion.
Philip M. Rosenzweig
I dozed, jolting occasionally at the driver's loud pronouncement of upcoming stops. At this early hour the bus hummed along quietly with few passengers, so the stops were infrequent. In the hazy surrealism of predawn, there really was not much to see--what I could make out was mainly countryside, though not what I would call quaint, and certainly no Shakespearean cottages or fairy folk peeping from the trees.
Carolyn Weber
I was fifteen.I was bored.I was miserable.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Never forget those who helped you along the way
Heather Richardson Hayton
Neythen looked perplexed. 'My mum always said I'm named after a saint, not an illness.''Which one?''Well he had his head chopped off, see? And then he picked it up and carried it down the road a time. All the way back home, I think.''Messy,' Piers said. 'Not to mention unlikely, though one has to think of chickens and their post-mortal abilities. Did she think that you would inherit the same gift?'Neythen blinked. 'No, my lord.''Perhaps she was just hopeful. It behooves mothers to look ahead to this sort of possibility, after all. I'm tempted to behead you just to see if she was right.Sometimes the most unlikely superstitions turn out to have a basis in fact.
Eloisa James
If you cannot solve a problem, ask someone who knows.
Eraldo Banovac