Quotes by Professors - Page 3

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

Leslie Jamison

Is this what Principal Fontana meant by the phrase 'well-rounded'?It’s fucking spherical, Catamounts.

Sam Lipsyte

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.

Hugh MacLennan

Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own, through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God--through certainty that only God can set everything to rights, and faith that in the end, He will. Man can only ameliorate, not cure.

J. Budziszewski

You know what you learn when you study the legal system? Poor people pass down damage the way rich people pass down an inheritance.

Dan Chaon

She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating.

Alexander McCall Smith

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

Alexander McCall Smith

Nothing...They're from nothing,' he said. 'They came in the book...I found the book and inside were these flowers...They were in the book when I bought it... I bought it used...Because they meant something."'To someone else.' 'To someone.

Aimee Bender

Are there many little boys who think they are a Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded himJoyfully

Anne Carson

You don't have to reinvent the wheel... just steal the hubcaps.

michael p naughton

But Krishna was a chameleon.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave.

Mark Mirabello

Many of the greatest books are like a forest. “The best way to get to know them is to wander right into the middle and get lost.

Anthony M. Esolen

Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.

Aimee Bender

The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of string. The true terror was that we once didn't exist and then through no fault of our own we had to.

Dan Chaon

Tangerine tango was still in. Cardigans without buttons were in. Bahia bands were in. Senhor do Bonfim. Make a wish? But hardly anyone considered the most radical move: be yourself. Beauty is always a revolutionary act.

Chris Campanioni

It was the discovery of the quantum universe that changed everything, and that universe was so small and so dynamic that it could not be observed directly. Trying to explain their insights, scientists looked at the language of mysticism. At the subatomic level, the parallels between quantum reality and mysticism were striking. For example, the behavior of light: in some contexts it acted like a wave, in others like a particle. Could it be both? Physicists had no concept for grasping this, so they dispensed with Western logic and embraced paradox. (This is important, too, for the notion of vampires being both living and dead.)

Katherine Ramsland

See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,’ [the land] said. ‘Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on – can you hear me? Pass it on!

Toni Morrison

To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.

Leah Stewart

She wasn’t going to sit and wait. She was done waiting, because you could spend your whole life waiting for something to happen. Something big. You could wait and wait, and even if something big happened, even if it finally happened—it didn’t change anything.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Her innocence was maddening. She should know. She should know what her steward had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d given the order or not–and whether she knew or not. Innocent? Her? Never.He did not want her to know. He did not want her to see. But:Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me. She lifted her eyes, and did.

Marie Rutkoski

Haven't we all, as time continues, found that we must be kind to ourselves and listen to our thoughts, because fewer and fewer of those remain who know what is most real to us?

Lan Samantha Chang

I am so afraid that strangers with think me good! and there is a degree of hypocrisy in appearing much better than one is.” - Hannah More

Karen Swallow Prior

Store speculates:Some creative people… of predominantly schizoid or depressive temperaments... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is a small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state... Is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility. For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not the case. Creative activity is a particularly apt way to express himself... The activity is solitary... [but] the ability to create and the productions which result from such ability are generally regarded as possessing value by our society.

Sylvia Nasar

Respect flows two ways and can mean as much to the giver as to the one receiving.

David Anthony Durham

Faith moves mountains but you have to keep pushing while you are praying.

Mason Cooley

If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved. In other words, we don’t just sit and hope that things will work out; we have a role to play to make that come about.

Chinua Achebe

for a purpose without reason

Donald Kingsbury

Our bodies won't have secrets now.

André Aciman

Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.

Toni Morrison

By learning to observe without becoming involved, the pattern of stimulus-response which underlies most human behaviour can be broken. Little by little the realisation dawns that one is free to choose how to react in all situations … The grip of long-standing habits is weakened and replaced with a new sense of freedom.

Damien Keown

The sensayer frowned. “You’re saying you discuss theology while having sex.”“For beginners it’s before and after mostly, managing it during sex takes skill and concentration.

Ada Palmer

Reasons are whores.

Leonard Michaels

Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.

Alexander McCall Smith

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

John Gardner

We were born between Oh Yeah& Goddammit. I knew lifeBegan where I stood in the dark,Looking out into the light,& that sometimes I could seeEverything through nothing.The backyard trees breathedLike a man running from himselfAs my brothers backed awayFrom the screendoor.

Yusef Komunyakaa

But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase that rose higher than my head and leaned dangerously from the wall, books sat in stacks on top of a dingy dresser. The closet door was propped open by a pile of books, and from beneath the bed a book stuck out beside the toe of a maroon slipper.

Steven Millhauser

Glinda waved dismissively. Then she tucked her hand against her mouth and bit her knuckles. It was hard to tell if her pretty ways were studied or innate. "Oh, oh," she managed, "I don't know that I'll see you again- and you remind me so of her.

Gregory Maguire

I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?

Alexandra Kleeman

Passion is never enough neither is skill.

Toni Morrison

A person with great knowledge is truly wealthy.

Eraldo Banovac

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.

Andrew Solomon

A steady exposure to distant human need that is beyond our personal response can gradually inoculate us against particular action. . . Isolation from local need, and overexposure to overwhelming but distant need, make our responses to strangers uncertain and tentative at best.We need to find or create contemporary equivalents of the city gate, community rituals, and small group meetings in which we can build preliminary relations with strangers.

Christine Pohl

all living creatures are entitled to respect in their own right, not simply because of the utility they may possess for other humans.

Damien Keown

....Charles laughingly observed,'Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.

Craig Werner

She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.

Alexander McCall Smith

The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.

Thomas Nagel

What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.

André Aciman

And if I am comfortable with it, why do I still call it loneliness? Because--and I think somehow she would understand this--you can have and recognize a sadness in your alienation and in other people's alienation and still not long to be around anyone. I think that if you wonder about other people's loneliness, or contemplate it at all, you've got a real leg up on being comfortable on your own.

Dana Spiotta

Regarding quality, the following rule is very important: do each activity right at the first time with the aim of saving money and time. Regardless of the process under consideration, the activities that were carried out badly may cause repetitions with considerable additional costs.

Eraldo Banovac

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Junot Díaz

Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

If he could not restore her to the status of a respectable woman, then Sohrab would make her into something else entirely, something hitherto unknown in their entire extended family, an educated woman, a professional woman.

Jasmin Darznik

The underlying logic of sacrifice was always the same: In order to gain the god's goodwill, destroy what you value most.

Barry B. Powell

Through it all, we attempt to bring balance to the present moment,understanding that in patience lies wisdom,knowing that what will come next will be determined in large measure by how we are now.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

At the end of every diet the path curves back toward the trough.

Mason Cooley

I still love the sound of breaking,the tearing of the page

Dean Young

Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.

Gary D. Schmidt

Living honestly is a prerequisite for a clear conscience.

Eraldo Banovac

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed and go to therapy, our therapist’s job is to help us tell our story. Life doesn’t come with plots; it’s messy and chaotic; life is one damn, inexplicable thing after another. And we can’t have that. We insist on meaning. And so we tell stories so that our lives make sense.

John Dufresne

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