Quotes by Professors - Page 11

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.

Alexander McCall Smith

Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.

Barbara Johnson

It’s been a long, rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

Gregory Maguire

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Martin Amis

I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody’s cousin’s gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

Sam Lipsyte

The worst cynicism a belief in luck.

Joyce Carol Oates

The human body experiences a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. That is why the patient's hopes are the physician's secret weapon. They are the hidden ingredients in any prescription.

Norman Cousins

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

Joyce Carol Oates

When we don't automatically take them (thoughts) personally or believe the stories about "reality" that we build from them,when we can simply hold them in awareness with a sense of curiosity and wonder at their amazing power given their insubstantiality, their limitations,and inaccuracies,then we have a chance right in that moment,in any moment really,to not get caught in their habitual patterning,to see thoughts for what they are,impersonal events.Then in that moment at least, we are already free,ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding-- not always as we think it should,but definitely as it is.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

And next time we hear someone saying something like, 'We are pursuing this strategy because other strategies, when we had considered them, we concluded that, in terms of overall effectiveness, they were not sound strategies, which is why we enacted the one we are now embarked upon, which our enemies would like to see us fail, due to they hate freedom,' we will wait to see if the anchorperson cracks up, or chokes back a sob of disgust, and if he or she does not, we'll feel a bit insane, and therefore less confident, and therefore more passive.

George Saunders

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.

Elie Wiesel

Jude had witnessed all of this with the dejected respect one had for people with destructive talents, like winning hamburger-eating contests.

Eleanor Henderson

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

Harry Crews

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

Joyce Carol Oates

Real strength isn’t control. It’s knowing when to let go.

Christopher Barzak

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted to participate in history could escape. The major had the right to live, and I was right to kill him. Wasn't I?

Viet Thanh Nguyen

We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over itsunsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,but the brack of wanting what’s physicalto help us forget we are physical.

Cate Marvin

You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

Alexander McCall Smith

Interestingly, the more Americans report knowing about Muslim countries, the more likely they are to hold positive views of those countries. (p. 155)

John L. Esposito

Nothing is more important than a great idea that influenced thedevelopment of civilization.

Eraldo Banovac

This view of literature as an aesthetic object that could make us ‘better people’ is linked to a certain idea of the subject, to what theorists have come to call ‘the liberal subject’, the individual defined not by a social situation and interests but by an individual subjectivity (rationality and morality) conceived as essentially free of social determinants.

Jonathan Culler

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

When everyone is famous, no one will be famous.

michael p naughton

It happened so quickly. One minute I was plucking the flower, and the next I was in his chariot immersed in darkness. I struggled to wrench myself free from his grasp and run away. I twisted as far as I could, hoping to see mother chasing after me. But ahead of me, behind me, on either side of me, everywhere I looked, all I could see was darkness.

Tamara Agha-Jaffar

Our knowledge can only be finite while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

Karl Popper

Enlightened sexism is a response, deliberate or not, to the perceived threat of a new gender regime. It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has allegedly been achieved — so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.

Susan J. Douglas

Why couldn't Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I'd talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I'd look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I'd play her at... chess and backgammon and things.

Martin Amis

Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.

Thomas C. Foster

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Martin Amis

Impartially, shrewdly, I considered suicide, though not in my worst moments. The bottle of pills. The note: 'No hard feelings, everyone, but I've thought about it and it's just not on, is it? It's nearly on, but not quite. No? Anyway, all the best, C.

Martin Amis

Surely it is better, thought Domenica, that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like...Professor Hawking's Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of...of whatever it is that the book is about?

Alexander McCall Smith

California has legislatively barred alimony payments to a dependent spouse who has attempted to murder the supporting spouse. Cal. Fam. Code § 4324.

D. Kelly Weisberg

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

You get exactly what you want, Anatole’s always suspected, only when you get it it’s no longer what you want, you need something else.

Paul Russell

Nothing ever tasted any better than a cold beer on a beautiful afternoon with nothing to look forward to but more of the same.

Hugh Hood

Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.

Amos Oz

Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one’s whole life in irreversible conflagration.

Paul Russell

I wish I loved the human Race, I wish I loved its silly face, and when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought "what jolly fun"!

Walter Alexander Raleigh

Do not look for company at all costs, and especially do not allow loneliness to lead you to fickle love or false friendship.

Eraldo Banovac

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.

Anne Carson

If you do not manage things, be prepared to face the consequences.

Eraldo Banovac

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

Toni Morrison

Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.

Margaret McMullan

Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

Joyce Carol Oates

To own beauty is the first lie of it.

Chris Campanioni

We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders

J. Jack Halberstam

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

Amos Oz

The hallmarks of the noir style are fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, sexual obsession and social corruption, a sense that the world is controlled by, malignant forces preying on us, a rejection of happy endings and a preference for resolutions heavy with doom, but always redeemed by a breathtakingly vivid poetry of word (if the work was a novel or story) or image (if it was a movie). ("Introduction")

Francis M. Nevins Jr.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, the United States was created by an enlightened band of Founding Fathers with a global vision for the new republic.

Patrick Mendis

Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us.

Terryl Givens

The dynamic nature of knowledge is reflected in human progress and technological achievements.

Eraldo Banovac

I hold the biscuits in front of his face and he stands up."What do I have to do?" he says."Nothing," I say. "They're for you.""Are they poisoned?" he says."No," I say."Eat one," he says.So I do."Probably the others are poisoned," he says. "Eat a fraction of each."I eat a corner off each biscuit. He looks at the reminders suspiciously, then sniffs them."I'm not sure it's worth it," he says. "How I wish you'd never come. Perhaps you've left the poison off of just those corners."I begin to realize I'll doubt whatever information he gives me."Lick the entire biscuit," he says. "Then give them to me."So I lick each biscuit."Both sides," he says.I lick both sides of each biscuit. I give him the wet biscuits and he cracks them open and sniffs them. Then he puts them in his pocket. "What do you want?" he says. "Now that you've failed to poison me to death.

George Saunders

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

Thomas C. Foster

You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

Louis Menand

The law is so complex and voluminousthat no one, not even the most knowledgeable lawyer, can understand itall. Moreover, lawyers and legal scholars have not gone out of their wayto make the law accessible to the ordinary person. Just the opposite: Legalprofessionals, like the priests of some obscure religion, too often try tokeep the law mysterious and inaccessible.

Jay M. Feinman

We play phone tag, back and forth, the kind of tag where it's clear we're avoiding each other, where no one wants to be touched, tagged, you're it

Adam Berlin

From my earliest works written in the 1950s and 1960s, I have claimed that there is such a thing as Islamic science with a twelve-hundred-year tradition of its own and that this science is Islamic not only because it was cultivated by Muslims, but because it is based on a worldview and a cosmology rooted in the Islamic revelation.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantagepoint in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

One person's weed is another person's wildflower.

Susan Wittig Albert

Hesitantly, I touched the stump where my finger used to be. In my mind, something almost remembered itself, but the fumes of turpentine were making me a little lightheaded; whatever memory was on the verge of coughing itself up was gone even before it materialized. Out the window, I could see a squirrel was stumbling erratically around in circles underneath the old basketball net. Then I realized that it wasn't a squirrel; it was a brown paper bag.

Dan Chaon

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