Quotes by Professors - Page 17

Commentators frequently blame MMORPGs for an increasing sense of isolation in modern life. But virtual worlds are less a cause of that isolation than a response to it. Virtual worlds give back what has been scooped out of modern life. The virtual world is in important ways more authentically human than the real world. It gives us back community, a feeling of competence, and a sense of being an important person whom people depend on.

Jonathan Gottschall

We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.

Timothy Schaffert

The most costly disease is not cancer or coronaries. The most costly disease is boredom - costly for both individual and society.

Norman Cousins

(J)oy deserves always more.

Linda McCarriston

I felt the pain and the glory of growth, was straining and shuddering with it.

Nnedi Okorafor

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

Andrew Solomon

Sometimes the best discoveries are the result of simple observations

Dr. Seyed Reza Agha Seyed Hosseini

The trouble with Grace, she thought, is that she is so literal. But that was the trouble with most people, when it came down to it; there were very few who enjoyed flights of fantasy, and to have that sort of mind--one which enjoyed dry with and understood the absurd--left one in a shrinking minority.

Alexander McCall Smith

..what moved me was that I had found something I didn't think could exist. And that thing - the thing that I found - was very simple. Most people know all about it and have never really doubted it because their lives have been such as to give them a glimpse of the thing that they were not sure about, which is love, of course: the sheer fact of feeling of love for another, of finding the one person - the only person, it seems - who makes the world make sense. It's like discovering the map that you've been looking for all your life and have never been able to find - the map that makes sense of the journey.

Alexander McCall Smith

Tacit collaboration by millions whobite their lip is even more essential than lip service by thousands of favor seekers. Hence, to stimulate at least passive cooperation, the party strives to give the impression that “everybody” is already on its side. (The Rise of Political Correctness)

Angelo Codevilla

Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.We all have history. You can think you're over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

Roxane Gay

The witch-hunt narrative is a really popular story that goes like this: Lots of people were falsely convicted of child sexual abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s. And they were all victims of a witch-hunt. It just doesn’t happen to line up with the facts when you actually look at the cases themselves in detail. But it’s a really popular narrative — I think it’s absolutely fair to say that’s the conventional wisdom. It’s what most people now think is the uncontested truth, and those cases had no basis in fact. And what 15 years of painstaking trial court research (says) is that that’s not a very fair description of those cases, and in fact many of those cases had substantial evidence of abuse. The witch-hunt narrative is that these were all gross injustices to the defendant. In fact, what it looks like in retrospect is the injustices were much more often to children.

Ross Cheit

The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

Louis Simpson

The advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don’t need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don’t have any use for it.

Robert Hellenga

She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?

Anne Carson

All violence is based on blindness, on a lack of reflection and empathy.

Azar Nafisi

You need to learn how to walk the world, he told me. There's a lot out there.

Junot Díaz

In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.

Craig Raine

Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom

Louis Menand

History is the archaeology of the present and future.

Patrick Mendis

There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.

Alexandra Kleeman

When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth

Chinua Achebe

At some point we have to give up and say that's just the way it is. Or, not give up and push on.

Leonard Susskind

She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma Ramotswe--a camouflage tent of the sort that the Botswana Defence Force might use. But I do not sit in judgement on the dresses of others, she told herself, and a tent was a practical enough garment, if that is what one felt comfortable in.

Alexander McCall Smith

Sometimes, there aren't any good choices. Sometimes, making the right one is hard... It's funny, but when you think about it, we're all broken. That's what life does. It knocks you down and breaks you and you either get back up again, or you don't. You either do things on your terms, or you don't. You let the bad things win, or you don't.""You either let it break you, or you don't.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

When you experience a negative circumstance or event, do not dwell on it. Be proactive — put your attention on what you need to do to bring the situation to a positive result.

Rodolfo Costa

Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.

Adam Grant

The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an absence of the inclination of matter to be at peace.

Gregory Maguire

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—

Joyce Carol Oates

In each case, the relative cost of postponing the purchase for buyer and seller determines the intensity of competition between the [past and future] selves of the seller. If the buyer has a lower cost of postponing the purchase (delay, making do with an interior model) than the seller (inventory, staff salaries) the buyer has the bargaining power.

Rakesh V. Vohra

We go from curiosity to a search for communion.

Sherry Turkle

If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.

Jack D. Zipes

One of history's most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out.

Stephen R. Prothero

A woman's love for a man is ha;f animal passion and half hate. The more a woman loves a man, the more she hates him. If a man is worth having, he must be a woman's superior; if he is her superior, part of her must hate him. It is only in beauty we surpass you, and it is therefore no wonder that we worship beauty above all else.

Jed Rubenfeld

Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore.

Gregory Maguire

You think because he doesn't love you that you are worthless. You think because he doesn't want you anymore that he is right- that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Hagar, don't. It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love. Love shouldn't be like that.

Toni Morrison

I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?'" 'The way I want it?'" 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more than what it is?'" 'What'st eh point? I can't change it.'" 'That's the point. If you don't, it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.'" 'Mess it up how?'" 'Forgot it.'" 'Forgot?'" 'Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.

Toni Morrison

She wondered sometimes if it wasn't all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn't really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself.

Danielle Evans

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

Joyce Carol Oates

The problem with parents is that they're adults.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

When choosing a profession, a person will have good incentive for personal development by choosing such a profession that represents a personal challenge.

Eraldo Banovac

Often, the human animal dresses terror in rage, and expresses both in a way unlike either.

Julius Lester

There can be no god without desire.

David Vann

A lie distorts the image of reality. It is a delusion of the human mind which can disrupt an individual's sense of what is morally right or wrong.

Eraldo Banovac

…the world was a vale of tears—it always had been.

Alexander McCall Smith

But we don’t think too well when we want too much.

Marie Rutkoski

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Joyce Carol Oates

The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.

Elie Wiesel

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

Donald Barthelme

The heaviness of loss in her heart hadn't eased, but there was room there for humour, too.

Nalo Hopkinson

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

Edward Said

I know everything, you see,' the old voice wheedled. 'The beginning, the present, the end. Everything. You now, you see the past and the present, like other low creatures: no higher faculties than memory and perception. But dragons, my boy, have a whole different kind of mind.' He stretched his mouth in a kind of smile, no trace of pleasure in it. 'We are from the mountaintop: all time, all space. We see in one instant the passionate vision and the blowout.

John Gardner

Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

Alexander McCall Smith

However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…

Alexander McCall Smith

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay--this sense that you didn’t have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.

George Saunders

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