Quotes by Professors - Page 70

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.
David Morrell
People tend to romanticise consciousness, as if it’s something spiritual. It’s just a word we use to describe complexity.
David Walton
It isn’t hard to find evil in this world. Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.
Gregory Maguire
A steady exposure to distant human need that is beyond our personal response can gradually inoculate us against particular action. . . Isolation from local need, and overexposure to overwhelming but distant need, make our responses to strangers uncertain and tentative at best.We need to find or create contemporary equivalents of the city gate, community rituals, and small group meetings in which we can build preliminary relations with strangers.
Christine Pohl
human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with "other" cultures.
Edward Said
On my more difficult days, I'm not sure what's more of a pain in my ass -- being black or being a woman. I'm happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening.
Roxane Gay
Little Fists, what's wrong?
Marie Rutkoski
What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.
George Saunders
There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.
Gregory Maguire
Mathematics is not arithmetic. Though mathematics may have arisen from the practices of counting and measuring it really deals with logical reasoning in which theorems—general and specific statements—can be deduced from the starting assumptions. It is, perhaps, the purest and most rigorous of intellectual activities, and is often thought of as queen of the sciences.
Christopher Zeeman
To ask why we need libraries at all, when there is so much information available elsewhere, is about as sensible as asking if roadmaps are necessary now that there are so very many r
Jon Bing
It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.
Dan Chaon
It's hard to fuck your girlfriend when she's fucked up and you're not. It's harder than the skee-ball they used to have at the Plaza arcade, all that agony over a fuzzy piece.
Sam Lipsyte
There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives.
Azar Nafisi
Show me a person in my shoes who is looking for a robot, and I'll show you someone who is looking for a person and can't find one.
Sherry Turkle
A library is never -- for lovers of the written word -- simply a place for conserving or storing books but rather a sort of living creature with a personality and even moods which we should understand and learn to live with.
Francisco Márquez Villanueva
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.
Norman Maclean
It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.
John Williams
After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
That was the first time I did coke.My body, it was electric. For the first time in my life I felt as if I had a real heart and a real body and I knew that there was this fire in me that could have lit up the entire universe. No book had ever made me feel that way. No human being had ever made me feel like that.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Stories carry things. A lesson or moral. Information or a take-home message.
Jonah Berger
The Ottawa river flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec.
Hugh MacLennan
A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing.
Azar Nafisi
Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.
Gregory Maguire
A gentleman need not know Latin but he should at least have forgotten it.
Brander Matthews
The essence of leadership is not giving things or even providing visions. It is offering oneself and one's spirit.
Lee G. Bolman
I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.
Chris Adrian
Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19)
Robin R. Meyers
Striving to convey to this beloved audience of one what was going on around me during those five years, I learned the power of language to map a life, to overcome a distance, to focus attention on what matters most.
Scott Russell Sanders
This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?
Kiese Laymon
I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.
Toni Morrison
Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.
Margaret McMullan
Organizations are not designed for innovation. Quite the contrary, they are designed for ongoing operations.
Vijay Govindarajan
The Grocery Checkout Proviso: The more things you care about, the more vulnerable you are. If you are part of that epicurean minority in this country that is still offended by violations of the English language, you will be slapped in the face every time you stand in line at the market. FIFTEEN ITEMS OR LESS. Caring passionately about grammar—caring passionately about anything most of humanity doesn’t care about—is like poking a giant hole in your life and letting the wind blow everything around.
Rachel Kadish
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
Anne Carson
But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.
Junot Díaz
[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.
Anthony M. Esolen
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Joyce Carol Oates
When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.
Paul Russell
Grief and rage--you need to contain that, to put a frame around it, where it can play itself out without you or your kin having to die. There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you--may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.
Anne Carson
Continuous denial of rational arguments represents a contempt of common sense.
Eraldo Banovac
The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.
André Aciman
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
Richard M. Rorty
What about stakes in the heart?" I asked now. He frowned, the center of his mouth pursed while its corners curled downward. "Anyone will die from a stake in the heart," he said. "And anyone will die if they're severely burned, including vampires.
Susan Hubbard
Intellectual capacity is a precondition for becoming a man of knowledge.
Eraldo Banovac
The best way I can think to describe it, she said, ' is the way, when you're driving on the freeway at night how everyone can see the moon in their window. Every car on the road. Every car feels the moon is following that car, even in the other direction, right? Everyone in that entire hemisphere can see the moon and think it is there for them, is following where they go.
Aimee Bender
The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It's no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, let's the texter/former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can't live propless.
Aimee Bender
I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell herself a joke and clap her hands together as she let out a laugh; she would murmur to the plants as she watered them, and offer encouragement to the food as she cooked it. Sometimes I would walk into a room and surprise her as she was regaling herself with some delightful story, and I remember how the sound would dry up in her mouth. She stood there, frozen in the headlights of my teenage scorn.
Dan Chaon
Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
Karl-Erik Sveiby
It was like being at the bottom of an ocean, she said. There was no light and a whole ocean crushing down on you. But most people had gotten so used to it they thought it normal, they forgot even that there was a world above.
Junot Díaz
When you stand inside somebody's library, you get a powerful sense of who they are, and not just who they are now but who they've been. . . . It's a wonderful thing to have in a house. It's something I worry is endangered by the rise of the e-book. When you turn off an e-book, there's no map. All that's left behind is a chunk of gray plastic. ~ Lev Grossman
Leah Price
I know already that I can survive it. That's the sorrow of it all. That whatever comes I'll survive it. I mean, even if the worst were to be true, would it really be the worst?
Scott Hutchins
Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.
Richard Mitchell
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
Toni Morrison
-So you don't believe we have souls I guess?" and Legs laughed and said, "Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
Joyce Carol Oates
Maybe that was the secret to happiness, I thought, being free of the responsibility of yourself.
Alexandra Kleeman
The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it withing his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
Norman Cousins
Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare.
Alexander McCall Smith