Quotes by Professors - Page 12

There is nothing particularly special about that location of the centre of mass. If you were to find yourself at the precise spot that is the centre of mass of the earth-moon system, the only thing unusual that you would notice is that there would be one thousand miles of rock on top of your head.Pluto is only about twice the size of Charon, so if you put Pluto and Charon on the cosmic seesaw you would find that the balance point is a little bit outside Pluto, rather than inside it. Again, there is nothing particularly special going on there. If you were to find yourself at that precise spot, you would only notice that you were very, very cold and could no longer breathe.

Mike Brown

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

It is not acceptable that election winners interpret history. History should be left to historians who have a difficult task. They should try to avoid a one-sided or personal interpretation of history. Furthermore, some collective factors (such as national enthusiasm) may influence objectivity that is crucial for the interpretation of historical events.

Eraldo Banovac

You know how the story ends. He escaped and went on to become the greatest chief Suntown ever had. He never built a shrine or a temple or even a shack in the name of Tia. In the Great Book, her name is never mentioned again. He never mused about her or even asked where she was buried. Tia was a virgin. She was beautiful. She was poor. And she was a girl. It was her duty to sacrifice her life for his.

Nnedi Okorafor

A world in which deliberate practice is a normal part of life would be one in which people had more volition and satisfaction.

Anders Ericsson

As if all that weren't enough, factor in the whole tedious millenial saga of female virtue, modesty, shame, repression, male ineptitude...in short, a cruel combo of anatomical inheritance and sexual inhibition for the gal set; a nature-culture one-two punch, right to the female pleasure principle.

Laura Kipnis

He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel that, in stories, words could command things to be.

Francis Spufford

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.

Aimee Bender

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

John Dufresne

Yandex translation from Croatian to English: Nomadom was the time when the ratio of beauty began to think about how about love than between two parts, in which opposites attract only magical powers, and the same ratio is equal to the lords and architecture and nature.

Jasna Horvat

But a central message there is, and it is the recognition of this that has led to the common treatment of the Bible as a book, and not simply a collection of books - just as the Greek plural biblia (books) became the Latin singular biblia (the book).

Philip W. Comfort

Take responsibility for your own happiness, do not expect people or things to bring you happiness, or you could be disappointed.

Rodolfo Costa

If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.

Alexander McCall Smith

It has always seemed to me that hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors.

Norman Cousins

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

Shall I make you a cup of tea? He asked. It was the classic response to crisis practiced throughout these islands—in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. Emotional turmoil, danger, even disaster could be faced with far greater equanimity if the kettle was switched on. War has been declared! There’s been a major earthquake! The stock market has collapsed! Oh really? Let me put the kettle on….

Alexander McCall Smith

[R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, "I don't know," and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself for it. After all, in this moment, it may be an accurate statement of how things are for you.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk

Chinua Achebe

The idea of the Bible as a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life, is our golden calf. It's a substitute for the wilderness wandering that the life of faith necessarily entails.

Timothy Beal

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.

Lance Olsen

But the Christian writer seems, by the usual course of the argument, to have been deprived of the common presumption of charity in his favor; and reversing the ordinary rule of administering justice in human tribunals, his testimony is unjustly presumed to be false, until it is proved to be true. ...{independent historians} have been treated, in the argument, almost as if the New Testament were the entire production, at once, of a body of men, conspiring by a joint fabrication, to impose a false religion upon the world.

Simon Greenleaf

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.

T.C. Boyle

empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.

Simon Baron-Cohen

And that would be my method of locomotion, the Lion concluded. Not diplomas earned, but friendships bungled. Campaigns aborted. Errors in judgment and public humiliations.

Gregory Maguire

What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Junot Díaz

Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven—where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with—he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.

Junot Díaz

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

Sherry Turkle

Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.” (The Rise of Political Correctness)

Angelo Codevilla

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

Chinua Achebe

When man penetrates the mysteries of Nature, the "facts of Nature" become transparent symbols, revealing the "divine energies" and the "angelic" state which fallen man has lost, and which he may recover only for a moment, as when he is enraptured by the beauty of music or of a lovely face. At such moments man forgets his limited self, his individualistic dream, and participates in the cosmic dream, thus becoming freed from the prison of his own carnal soul.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

A convergence exists in the search for human excellence on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Patrick Mendis

I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginningwhat couldn't happen. What couldn't

Frank Bidart

Just as we can’t fully explain what is beautiful, so we can’t fully explain why we are friends with someone in a way that will make the grounds of our attraction obvious to another — and even to ourselves. Our efforts always leave something out. And it is what is always left out that we try to gesture toward when we say that it is not something ABOUT our friends that we love but our friends THEMSELVES. But the self that we love is always just one one step behind whatever we can actually articulate. And so we are faced with a choice between saying something that seems informative but is never enough of an explanation ('loyal, practical, unworldly and so on') and saying something else that seems like an explanation but is completely uninformative ('the individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality').

Alexander Nehamas

We only have babies when we’re young enough not to know how grim life turns out.

Gregory Maguire

By all accounts Rafe's life had been shattered by the loss of his brother Peter. But whereas she turned away from drink when Draven died, Rafe had simply upended a barrel of brandy on his head and hadn't taken that hat off since.

Eloisa James

I very much like men. They're interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn't have to call them out so often.

Roxane Gay

A free man does not do what must be done, but what should be done.

Eraldo Banovac

What would the world be like if men never ruled again?

David Vann

correlation between the growing lack of respect for ideas and the imagination and the increasing gap between rich and poor in America, reflected not just in the gulf between the salaries of CEOs and their employees but also in the high cost of education, the incredible divide between private and public schools that makes all of the fine speeches by our policy makers— most of whom send their children to private schools anyway, just as they enjoy the benefits and perks of their jobs as servants of the people— all the more insidious and insincere.

Azar Nafisi

Literature is mostly about sex and not much about having children and life is the other way around.

David Lodge

They continued on to London, and she's there, safe and sound, waiting for you.''You can't know for sure.' Piers swung up into the carriage.'You will never know for sure if she's dead or alive unless you keep her near you all the time,' Sebastian said with perfect, if maddening, accuracy.

Eloisa James

Will you come with me?""Ah, Kestrel, that's something you never need to ask.

Marie Rutkoski

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

Adam Johnson

All this seeing.All this relentless taking in.

Lance Olsen

So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

Nalo Hopkinson

Whenever governments wanted to achieve some end, often involving population growth, they restricted access to birth control and/or criminalized birth control unless, of course, the population growth concerned the poor, in which case, contraception was enthusiastically promoted. Historically, society has only wanted the "right kind of people" to have a right to life. We shouldn't forget that fact.

Roxane Gay

He wanted to break me, the me I'd made, the me I'd needed to make, my need, mine, my whole life since I could remember. I didn't want to hear him that night. When I was ready to change I'd change. When life opens up before you, when you don't really know death ... it's easy to promise yourself change. Keeping the lines hard, the parts of me separate, was what I knew, how I lived.

Adam Berlin

Test-oriented teaching strikes me as anti-educational, a kind of unpleasant game that subverts the real aim of education: to waken a student to her or his potential, and to pursue a subject of considerable importance without restrictions imposed by anything except the inherent demands of the material.

Jay Parini

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.'Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

Toni Morrison

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

Toni Morrison

He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that's not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it... he is insane because when he loved you, you didn't notice.

Donald Barthelme

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

Joyce Carol Oates

Enjoy how sweet how thoughtful how kind I'm being on your birthday. Because tomorrow it's back to the same old crap.

Melvin Helitzer

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.

Joyce Carol Oates

What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.

Azar Nafisi

With the Internet, we can choose the very communities we want to be a part of.

Alex Shakar

A language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.

Bernard Bloch

He wondered if there was anyone in the world who liked him. Liked him for himself alone.

Toni Morrison

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