Quotes by Academics - Page 2

Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.

Sheila Jeffreys

If our ideas and beliefs are held with an awareness of abstracting, they can be changed if found to be inadequate or erroneous. But if they are held without an awareness of abstracting-if our mental maps are believed to be the territory-they are prejudices. As teachers or parents, we cannot help passing on to the young a certain amount of misinformation and error, however hard we may try not to. But if we teach them to be habitually conscious of the process of abstraction, we give them the means by which to free themselves from whatever erroneous notions we may have inadvertently taught them.

S.I. Hayakawa

I believe language is infinitely malleable, a live being in our hands, which deserves our great respect and curiosity

Brian Kiteley

Not all events are stories.

Scarlett Thomas

New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

Saul Bellow

Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.

Joanna Russ

Children can be disgusting, and often they can develop extraordinary talents, but I’m yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage.

Ben Goldacre

In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.

Abdourahman A. Waberi

The best way to secure future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully possible today.

Charles W. Eliot

No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.

Saul Bellow

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

Saul Bellow

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

Scarlett Thomas

You can thank Henry Ford for that. He was a warlock, you know.

Ian Richards

What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.

Scarlett Thomas

In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.

Scarlett Thomas

And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.

Saul Bellow

I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

Siri Hustvedt

There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be.

Scarlett Thomas

How is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?

Woodrow Wilson

I looked inward at my heart. And indeed, there too, the criss-cross corsetry was slackened and gaping. I was all undone. Potentially, I could spill. Or tangle. And so I began to tug at my own heartstrings, pulling them up tight until there was just the right amount of tension at each criss and each cross. Then I bent down to my boots and laced them firmly too, first the left, then the right, finishing off on each side with a surgeon's shoelace knot.

Danielle Wood

Emancipation resulting in madness. Unlimited freedom to choose and play a tremendous variety of roles with a lot of coarse energy.

Saul Bellow

The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.

Robert Macfarlane

Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.

Woodrow Wilson

Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.

Siri Hustvedt

The more you look into and understand yourself, the less judgmental you become towards others.

Tariq Ramadan

I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book.

Scarlett Thomas

Feeling offended is invigorating. Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It's easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people.

David Dark

You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

Reading can break us out of the tunnel vision of the narrow specialty and lead us into many intriguing and important avenues of thought.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Are not dreams as much a part of living as waking life is?

Siri Hustvedt

This condition in which women live is created out of, and defended by, a system of ideas represented by the world's religions, by psychoanalysis, by pornography, by sexology, by science and medicine and the social sciences.

Sheila Jeffreys

I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing?"This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.

Joanna Russ

. . . Nietzche himself had a Christian view of history, seeing the present moment always as some crisis, some fall from classical greatness, some corruption or evil to be saved from.

Saul Bellow

A man's rootage is more important than his leafage.

Woodrow Wilson

Brian knows the affair is wrong. He's known from the moment Wendy first undressed in his office. But with her hot, wet tongue in his ear, and her taut, pink nipples straining against his starched white shirt, and with Mick Jagger's strident voice squawking about satisfaction on the tiny transistor radio, Brian's body refuses to obey.Instead of shoving Wendy out the door, he shoves her onto the unmade bed.

Alison Lurie

No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.

Peter Slezak

(Ezekial saw the wheel(Way up in the middle of the air --(O Ezekial saw the wheel(Way in the middle of the air!(Now the big wheel runs by faith(And the little wheel runs by the grace of God --(The above made up by professional hope experts, you might say, because willful, voluntary, intentional hope was the only kind they had in anything like long supply. Faith is not, contrary to the usual ideas, something that turns out to be right or wrong, like a gambler's bet; it's an act, an intention, a project, something that makes you, in leaping into the future, go so far, far, far ahead that you shoot clean out of Time and right into Eternity, which is not the end of time or a whole lot of time or unending time, but timelessness, that old Eternal Now. So that you end up living not in the future ((in your intentional "act of faith")) but in the present. Afte

Joanna Russ

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

Woodrow Wilson

Oh no. I split my time between Paris and New York. They're the only places to really live.

Naomi Wood

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

Siri Hustvedt

The feminist girls she knew at Oberlin, her roommate among them, were the kind of people who made you feel bad for liking what you liked. Sometimes when Emily was tired or blue she liked to watch "When Harry Met Sally", or "Love Actually", or old episodes of "Friends", and at Oberlin she'd had to wait until her roommate had gone out or fallen asleep.

Brian Morton

...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.

Tariq Ramadan

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Siri Hustvedt

For me, this is when the act of watching transforms into the act of witnessing.To witness something implies a responsiveness, the response/ability of the viewer toward the performer. It is radically different from what we might call the 'consuming' gaze that says 'here, you entertain me, I bought a ticket, and I'm going to sit back and watch.' This traditional gaze doesn't want to get involved, doesn't want to give anything back.

Ann Cooper Albright

In a sudden and soundless eruption, as if he has fallen into a waking dream, a stream of images pours down, images of women he has known on two continents, some from so far away in time that he barely recognizes them. Like leaves blown on the wind, pell-mell, they pass before him. A fair field full of folk: hundreds of lives all tangled with his. He holds his breath, willing the vision to continue.What has happened to them, all those women, all those lives? Are there moments when they too, or some of them, are plunged without warning into the ocean of memory? The German girl: is it possible that at this very instant she is remembering the man who picked her up on the roadside in Africa and spent the night with her? Enriched: that was the word the newspapers picked on to jeer at. A stupid word to let slip, under the circumstances, yet now, at this moment, he would stand by it. By Melanie, by the girl in Touws River; by Rosalind, Bev Shaw, Soraya: by each of them he was enriched, and by the others too, even the least of them, even the failures. Like a flower blooming in his breast, his heart floods with thankfulness.

J.M. Coetzee

About Anna Faktorovich's "Romances of George Sand": “What a read! Not lacking in action and very imaginative.

Belinda Jack

If you are not EXCITED enough at your present life its mean your future is not EXITING. Excitement will give you ENTHUSIASM and enthusiasm will give you a positive energetic LIFE STYLE which could give you a successful exiting life…

Rashedur Ryan Rahman

Our society like decadent Rome has turned into an amusement society with writers chief among the court jesters - not so much above the clatter as part of it.

Saul Bellow

A Jew ain't only a religion, and it ain't a race. It isn't an ethnicity, and you aren't disqualified if you're good at spreading mayonnaise on white bread or bad at money or good at sports or bad at guilt. It ain't about whether your mother is Jewish or your father converted or both parents fasted on Yom Kippur. It don't matter if you were bar or bat mitzvahed, or if your grandma's recipe for chicken soup kicked Campbell's ass, or any of that. It ain't about a toe in Israel, or an opinion on Palestine, or an uncle who died of a heart attack in Brooklyn or Queens, or a family story from Ellis Island, or an aunt who was murdered by nazis or Russian pogromchiks, or whether or not three-fifths of your person is scared shitless of Auggie's "schvartzes," or at least the young bucks you see walking with guns out and half their pants down.

Alex Kudera

Believing, too, that is not enough. You cannot just believe. Your belief must have a purpose.

Ian Baucom

I said very little. I knew that for the time being I was the open air, the place to put the words, not a real interlocutor. And then, ekthout a transition of any kind, she began to tell me .... {p. 134}

Siri Hustvedt

Revolutionary art need not be overtly political in content; what is more important is that it demand a new means of perception on the part of its spectators. The subject in process/on trial can thus be fundamentally transformed. Change here, at the level of individual consciousness, is a necessary element of social change. Seen in this way, the arts are not merely reflective of social relations but are productive of social relations.

Ann Daly

Intellect is a part of a good faith. Intellect is the light, the heart is the direction.

Tariq Ramadan

Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life.

Woodrow Wilson

People make events into stories. Stories give events meaning.

Scarlett Thomas

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

Siri Hustvedt

The advice is a call to empathy, the ultimate act of the imagination, and the true ground of all fiction.

Siri Hustvedt

Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

Robert Macfarlane

Perhaps, she thought, that’s what love does. It’s not there to make you feel special. It’s to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie—two words for the same thing.

Katherine Rundell

The challenge of modern freedom, or the combination of isolation and freedom which confronts you, is to make yourself up. The danger is that you may emerge from the process as a not-entirely-human creature.

Saul Bellow

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