Quotes by Professors - Page 2

Few celebrate a dog who jumps at people as they approach--but start with the premise that it is we who keep ourselves (and our faces) unbearably far away, and we can come to a mutual understanding.

Alexandra Horowitz

And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.

André Aciman

A gentleman need not know Latin but he should at least have forgotten it.

Brander Matthews

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

Jack D. Zipes

I have always loved the many moods of the sky at Rocky Flats. Turquoise and teal in summer, fiery red at sunset, iron gray when snow is on the way. The land rolls in waves of tall prairie grass bowed to the wind, or sprawling mantles of white frosted with a thin sheath of ice in winter.

Kristen Iversen

Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19)

Robin R. Meyers

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Alexander Chee

These wars have been so great, they are forgotten Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed To wander through my brain four decades later As I have wandered in a dream through yours?The violence of waking life disruptsThe order of our death. Strange dreams occur, For dreams are licensed as they never were.

Louis Simpson

To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.

Strunk Jr.

When our commitment is wavering, the best way to stay on track is to consider the progress we've already made. As we recognize what we've invested and attained, it seems like a waste to give up, and our confidence and commitment surge.

Adam M. Grant

Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

Norman Maclean

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

Richard Powers

There was no better way to live, or worse. It was all terrible, and you had to do it constantly,

Alexandra Kleeman

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.

Donald Barthelme

The man who'll lay the last stone here isn't even born yet.

André Aciman

Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in a chair saying only "da-da," the slow-motion suicides, but at four, six, ten, they loomed, powerful, not as types but as themselves. Among them, logic takes wing." (pg. 31)

Frances Mayes

Healthy people have healthy boundaries. Unhealthy people, well, let’s not get into that. It’s like this: some people have walls which means they let no one in. This equals unhealthy. Some people let everyone in and let themselves be stepped all over. This equals unhealthy.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

From the age of 13, I was attracted to physics and mathematics. My interest in these subjects derived mostly from popular science books that I read avidly. Early on I was fascinated by theoretical physics and determined to become a theoretical physicist. I had no real idea what that meant, but it seemed incredibly exciting to spend one's life attempting to find the secrets of the universe by using one's mind.

David Gross

The First BookOpen it.Go ahead, it won't bite.Well. . . maybe a little.More a nip, like. A tingle.It's pleasurable, really.You see, it keeps on opening.You may fall in.Sure, it's hard to get started;remember learning to useknife and fork? Dig in:you'll never reach bottom.It's not like it's the end of the world--just the world as you thinkyou know it.

Rita Dove

Go to any small village anywhere in the world, and see what they remember. Everything. It's all there -- passed on like a precious piece of information, some secret imparted from one who knew to one who yearns to know. Taken good care of.

Alexander McCall Smith

Lizzie Bright Griffin, do you ever wish the world would just go ahead and swallow you whole?""Sometimes I do," she said, and then smiled. "but sometimes I figure I should just go ahead and swallow it.

Gary D. Schmidt

I wonder of what you must daily endure in America, having no government to protect you, no one to tell you what to do. Is it true you're given no ration card, that you must find food for yourself? Is it true that you labor for no higher purpose than paper money? What is California, this place you come from? I have never seen a picture. What plays over the American loudspeakers, when is your curfew, what is taught at your child-rearing collectives? Where does a woman go with her children on Sunday afternoons, and if a woman loses her husband, how does she know the government will assign her a good replacement? With whom would she curry favor to ensure her children got the best Youth Troop leader?

Adam Johnson

Motivating employees to work at their full potential is the main premise of successful management.

Eraldo Banovac

They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene.

Sam Lipsyte

I was pirouette and flourish,I was filigree and flame.How could I count my blessingswhen I didn't know their names?

Rita Dove

I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that.

Toni Morrison

You tried to play the game, okay? But they run the game. You don't run anything. That means you can't change anything. Not from the inside. When you got nothing, you got to change things from the outside.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

What happened to us? It was a question that interested her. Most people seemed to believe that they were experts of their own life story. They had a set of memories that they strung like beads, and this necklace told a sensible tale. But she suspected that most of these stories would fall apart under strict examination--that, in fact, we were only peeping through a keyhole of our lives, and the majority of the truth, the reality of what happened to us, was hidden. Memories were no more solid than dreams...What happened to us? She drew smoke, considering the question. Was it possible that we would never really know? What if we were not, actually, the curators of our own lives?

Dan Chaon

Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.

Paul Russell

But the lie had to be a good one, because if your lie is badly done it makes everyone feel wretched, liar and lied-to alike plunged into the deepest lackadaisy, and everyone just feels like going into the other room and drinking a glass of water, or whatever is available there, whereas if you can lie really well then get dynamite results, 35 percent report increased intellectual understanding, awareness, insight, 40 percent report more tolerance, acceptance of others, liking for self, 29 percent report they receive more personal and more confidential information from people and that others become more warm and supportive toward them--all in consequence of a finely orchestrated, carefully developed untruth.

Donald Barthelme

Lonely was much better than alone.

Toni Morrison

Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.

Kiese Laymon

I had a chance. I knew I had no more than that. it's all a hero asks for.

John Gardner

The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.

Andrew Solomon

Maturity understands that there’s darkness in the world but that there’s no need to dwell in it: we can lighten up and offer illumination to others.

Gina Barreca

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Anne Carson

It amazed Forrest that so many men seemed to wake up in the morning needing some kind of beating or another, men saying and doing fantastic things for the sake of getting another man to smash his face.

Matt Bondurant

The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men's power has won out over women's power, just like it's done on Mainground. But men still fear women's power. No one ever forgets their mother's power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don't forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child's craving for the comfort of women's bodies.

Chris Beckett

After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

What do you call the Hrothgar-wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked?

John Gardner

It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.

Scott Elledge

A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.

Chinua Achebe

The truth hurts, my man, but it's a good pain.

Joshua David Bellin

When the founding fathers conceived of this new nation, they understood that the education of its citizens would be essential to the health of their democratic enterprise. Knowledge was not just a luxury; it was essential.

Azar Nafisi

You can't lie a lifetime,son. Either you gon' tell the truth, or the truth's gon' tell on you

Daniel Black

Which is better: to dare to look directly into the blinding present, no matter how painful, or to await the detachment of hindsight -- which, being less painful, is more objective?

Thomas Buergenthal

For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. You're not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God's perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God’s Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you "what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature.

Timothy Beal

Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it's ugly to look at.

michael p naughton

In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.

Junot Díaz

In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.

Gregory Maguire

She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.

Toni Morrison

To cut 1930s jobless, FDR taxed corps and rich. Govt used money to hire many millions. Worked then; would now again. Why no debate on that?

Richard D. Wolff

Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky.

Elie Wiesel

Abba Marcius said, 'If you rebuke someone and do it with anger, you have allowed a passion to control you. You have not saved anyone and have destroyed yourself'.

Tim Vivian

And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?

Alexander McCall Smith

There are reasons we congregate in these hot spots- to worship beauty and to feel its effects light up the electrolytes in the bloodstream.

Frances Mayes

When an influencing idea comes to life, people cannot exactly predict all its inevitable consequences.

Eraldo Banovac

On the one hand we need the image of "the text" in order to focus on anything at all; on the other hand we use the metaphor of "reading" to signal that our apprehension of a text will always be partial, that we never quite reach the "text itself," a realization that has led certain critics to question the very existence of such an object.

Espen J. Aarseth

Jun Do had dealt with this his whole life, the ways it was impossible for people from normal families to conceive of a man in so much hurt that he couldn’t acknowledge his own son, that there was nothing worse than a mother leaving her children, though it happened all the time, that “take” was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.

Adam Johnson

When you're and only child in a family with an only parent, you look at other, bigger families with envy. Mary Alice had a family with a station wagon, a split-level house, and a pool. But then I looked up and saw Mary Alice's toes, as she stood at the edged of the diving board. Her second toe lay on top of her big toe on each foot. I had never seen such a thing. I wondered if Mary Alice's toes would ever prevent her from doing the things she wanted to do in life. "Look, y'all!" she said, forming her perfect body into a perfect swan's dive. I decided then that any time I got frustrated with my overall situation in life, mad or jealous of knee socks or a pink canopy bed in a pink room, I'd take a deep breath and think about Mary Alice's toes. At least I didn't have Mary Alice's toes.

Margaret McMullan

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