Quotes by Professors - Page 10

For Oscar, high school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were. He walked into school every day like the fat lonely nerdy kid he was, and all he could think about was the day of his manumission, when he would at last be set free from its unending horror. Hey, Oscar, are there faggots on Mars?—Hey, Kazoo, catch this. The first time he heard the term moronic inferno he know exactly where it was located and who were its inhabitants.

Junot Díaz

Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier.

Eraldo Banovac

You know, you're too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that," he said, pulling me toward him. I didn't know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only safer; that this, if it didn't happen now, would happen later but not better.

Danielle Evans

How they madeout of shamelessness somethingbeautiful, for as long as they could.

Carl Phillips

I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there.

Roxane Gay

Sometimes you hide away a memory because it is so precious that you don’t want to dilute it with the attempt to recount it.

Joshua Gaylord

More importantly, one could make the opposite argument to Leithart and Grant--that if good is guaranteed to win, then goodness becomes merely a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

Joseph Laycock

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.

David A. Karp

Hello, this is I, and these are my arms and legs, which are useful, and this inconvenient hump is my sorrow, which is less than useful, but I've learned how to hump it around, so pay it no mind.

Gregory Maguire

...after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

Aimee Bender

Good managers don't set a goal to increase efficiency, but rather an implementation of business process improvements that result in higher efficiency as well.

Eraldo Banovac

She looked not so much composed as drawn inward. She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

Azar Nafisi

In order to remain undead, I must steal the life force of someone whose fate matters less to me than my own.' I've always supposed that Wall Street traders utter essentially the same sentence.

Thomas C. Foster

I have argued elsewhere (Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence [2005]) that we need to treat ethics in biblical texts just as we treat ethics in any other works of ancient literature. It is a vacuous exercise to pick and choose which atrocities were really ordained by any gods and which were not. We should have a zero-tolerance view of any text or collection of texts that at any time endorses genocide, misogyny, and other atrocities. We always judge ancient texts by modern ethical standards, and the Bible should not be treated differently.

Hector Avalos

These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.

Azar Nafisi

Criticism is just someone else’s opinion. Even people who are experts in their ﬁelds are sometimes wrong. It is up to you to choose whether to believe some of it, none of it, or all of it. What you think is what counts.

Rodolfo Costa

He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.

Alexander McCall Smith

It was different to give something up than to see it taken away. The difference, Kestrel said, was choice.

Marie Rutkoski

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a cyclone.

Azar Nafisi

To lose your own language was like forgetting your mother, and as sad, in a way.

Alexander McCall Smith

This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps up and sings out, “Good morning, miss!” Twenty-three faces are smiling at me. Sometimes they shout it with so much conviction that I laugh.

Jamie Zeppa

One of my roommates, Rafael, he's an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment.

Jack D. Zipes

The more I see of the ‘hounoured, famed, and great,’ the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within.

Karen Swallow Prior

Neither (brother) even glaced at the counter. She smiled. Her dumb brothers never cooked. She didn’t think they even knew how! A human being who needs food to live but cannot prepare that food to eat? Pathetic. In this case, it was an advantage. They weren’t interested in any food until it had been cooked for them.

Nnedi Okorafor

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

Ben Marcus

A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.

Junot Díaz

We live through evolution ourselves, each of us, progressing through different apprehensions of the world, at each age forgetting the last age, every previous mind erased. We no longer see the same world at all.

David Vann

I hadn't even solved the mystery of my own body.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life.

Karen Swallow Prior

Don’t take everything for granted, and do not always count on finding everything you need.

Larry Herzberg

To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.

Gregory Maguire

I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

Gregory Maguire

There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride[.]

Alexander McCall Smith

While you can't hold on to everything forever, you're a fool if you sell back your college books at semester's end: have you learned nothing of this life?

Ander Monson

Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.

Leslie Jamison

Now she could smell what the jaguar could smell, odors deeper and richer than anything she had experienced before, layers of smell she could read like Fray Tomás had read the words in her father’s book: the wet decay of leaves, the death fear of a mouse, the poisonous cloy of datura, water and mud and insects, the wind carrying the smell of other animals, the wind itself, and the girl, of course, always the girl with her juicy flesh. The girl smelled incredibly good. Should the jaguar do this? Should Teresa eat herself?

Sharman Apt Russell

It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling.

Norman Maclean

Hard fun is, of course, the idea that we take pleasure in accomplishing something difficult: the joy in meeting and mastering a challenge. As a result, when someone is doing something that is hard fun, moment by moment it looks more like "work" than "fun," but the net effect is pleasurable overall.

David Williamson Shaffer

History is not coherent; moreover, the politics of coherence tend to drive history in the least tolerable directions.

Joshua Clover

The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.

John R. Stilgoe

Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.

Chris Campanioni

China has no choice but to emulate the power of America’s founding ideas and its journey through the universal values of democratic freedom and individual rights.

Patrick Mendis

For a moment, Milly couldn't breathe as her anger flew out of her chest and into her mouth. She ran her tongue over it, hard and bitter, then swallowed it again.

Roxane Gay

Art, he said, was a controlled madness...He said that books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

Steven Millhauser

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

I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn’t allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide. I felt the fatal tentacles of this despair wrapping themselves around my arms and legs. Soon they would hold the fingers I would need to take the right pills or to pull the trigger, and when I had died, they would be the only motion left. I knew that the voice of reason (“For heaven’s sake, just go downstairs!”) was the voice of reason, but I also knew that by reason I would deny all the poison within me, and I felt already some strange despairing ecstasy at the thought of the end. If only I had been disposable like yesterday’s paper! I would have thrown myself away so quietly then and been glad of the absence, glad in the grave if that was the only place that could allow some gladness.

Andrew Solomon

The right sort of lie, I found, could serve better than the truth.

Adam McOmber

And then Jonah heard God’s voice.t“Jonah, do you know what the difference is between you and the trees?”ttHe was confident it was God because God usually asked questions but gave no answers. Jonah didn’t need a divine answer to this question, he knew it.t“Yes,” he said. “The difference between me and the trees is that the trees let go of their leaves. I keep holding onto mine. The trees make room for new life. I don’t.

David W. Jones

If you really think that the enviroment is less important than the economy, try holding your breath while you count your money.

Dr. Guy McPherson

Our parents are always an important part of our inner life.

Eraldo Banovac

Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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

Success and failure are relative categories. Therefore, do not exult in victory and do not despair after defeat. Accept the changes in life placidly, knowing that autumn and winter come after summer.

Eraldo Banovac

she seemed happy, though perhaps a bit desperately so

John Williams

Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else's. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else's journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?

Jon Kabat-Zinn

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

Joyce Carol Oates

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.

Frances Mayes

Open mind → Learning → Knowledge → Baseline for leadership

Eraldo Banovac

I’ve just been transferred to Kanglung,” I say. They look at me to see if I am joking, and then they look at each other. There is a long, terrible silence and we all look at the floor. Karma Dorji wipes his runny nose on his sleeve and looks up. “Oh, miss,” he says sadly. “Please don’t go.”“Just a minute,” I say, and go into the bathroom. I latch the door and turn on the tap full force. When the water is running noisily, I lean my hot forehead against the damp, flaking concrete, and cry.

Jamie Zeppa

Previous 1 … 8 9 10 11 12 … 17 Next