Quotes by Professors - Page 5

So what is transgressive in the practice of this secret Tantra is the gesture not to elide the difference that women present. What does this mean? That women represent not merely objects, property, or the possibility of sexual gratification, but an opening point to the possibility of difference as the subjectivity of the other. . .Rather, a recognition of the difference women present offers the possibility of a choice not to objectify women. This recognition recodes gendered relations inscribing woman discursively in the place of the subject.

Loriliai Biernacki

The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose.

John Gardner

To believe that man’s aggressiveness or territoriality is in the nature of the beast is to mistake some men for all men, contemporary society for all possible societies, and, by a remarkable transformation, to justify what is as what needs must be; social repression becomes a response to, rather than a cause of, human violence. Pessimism about man serves to maintain the status quo. It is a luxury for the affluent, a sop to the guilt of the politically inactive, a comfort to those who continue to enjoy the amenities of privilege.

Leon Eisenberg

As in the universe every atom has an effect, however minuscule, on every other atom, so that to pinch the fabric of Time and Space at any point is to shake the whole length and breadth of it, so in fiction every element has effect on every other, so that to change a character's name from Jane to Cynthia is to make the fictional ground shudder under her feet.

John Gardner

In the morning, people have a plan for that day. Hardworking people think of what they will do during the day, and idle people on what they should do.

Eraldo Banovac

There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.

N. Scott Momaday

You should be aware of fake friends because it is the hardest to be aware of.

Eraldo Banovac

One summer night I fell asleep hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

The next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, of something being missing or not quite right, turn inward as an experiment. See if you can capture the energy of that very moment. Instead of picking up a magazine or going to the movies, calling a friend or looking for something to eat or acting up in one way or another, make a place for yourself. Sit down and enter into your breathing, if only for a few minutes. Don't look for anything - neither flowers not light nor a beautiful view. Don't extol the virtues of anything or condemn the inadequacy of anything. Don't even think to yourself, "I am going inward now." Just sit. Reside at the center of the world. Let things be as they are.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

Christopher Bigsby

I know. That sounds like a lie. But Presbyterians know that every so often a lie isn't all that bad, and I figured that this was about the best place it could happen.

Gary D. Schmidt

I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable--most folks where we've lived our whole lives don't trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes--they don't hide anything. If I don't care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don't care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don't know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn't bother with small lies.

Roxane Gay

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Karl R. Popper

She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest.

Alexandra Kleeman

Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...

Alexander McCall Smith

People are naturally hardworking but will stop working hard at anything if they learn from experience that their effort makes no difference.

Deborah Stone

I took me to the Banks of the River, and tarried there awhile, as the lowering Sun made one with the Water, giving generously of Itself & its Diverse Colors, in a Splay of Magnificence that preceded a most wonderful Silence.

George Saunders

The stupa is a white dome with a conical stone tower emerging from its center. There are two eyes painted on the tower, the all seeing eyes of Buddha. They're purple, and look a little sinister, like an Old Testament Buddha.

Joshua Isard

Love is always a surprise and you never get it right.

John Dufresne

I knew I was in love with The Hunger Games when I did not want to get off the treadmill

Roxane Gay

the book is intended to show how it is possible to live in and be enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it.

Gerald L. Sittser

Everything about us was entirely normal, really. We were as ordinary as anything we might come across in this world.

Christopher Barzak

O beautiful, to make escapeAnd leave this world behind.Had I to stay another dayI'd lose my fucking mind!

Gregory Maguire

Is Shimmer a floor wax or a dessert topping? Is an electron a wave or a particle? Slipstream tells us that the answer is yes.

John Kessel

The greatest writers have persistence.

Gina B. Nahai

This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.

Marcel Danesi

Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.

Paul Russell

He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness.

George Saunders

The odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim's. The people who lived there were odd. The things they did there were odd. Even the there itself there was odd.

Gregory Funaro

Happy the man who knows his duties!

Christian Furchtegott Gellert

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Joyce Carol Oates

I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.

Andrew Solomon

The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.

Adam M. Grant

Feet away, Professor Dema stood, carrying a large gunlike weapon with both her hands and a snarl on her lips. This was not the way final exams were supposed to go.

Nnedi Okorafor

It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

Alexander McCall Smith

But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.

Claire Messud

There will be danger; some of you may not live to complete your lessons. It's a risk you take. This world is bigger than you and it will go on, regardless.

Nnedi Okorafor

Economics has made good on its promise to deliver prosperity and democratic freedom to much of the world, but in doing away with the age-old problems of humanity, it has opened up a crisis of an entirely new variety.

Philip Roscoe

He would never again need anything from his mother and father but their love.

Frederick Drimmer

Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,

Anne Carson

The new vantage from which Christian theology as a discourse on Christian identity must operate in the modern world, then, is the Christological horizon of Mary-Israel. To be Christian is to enter into this horizon. But where is the horizon concretely displayed, where is it made visible if not in despised dark (and especially dark female) flesh? Is this not the flesh of homo sacer . . .the flesh that is impoverished, "despised and rejected of men," flesh that in shame we "hide our faces from" (cf. Isa. 53:3)? But if this is the case, it follows that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God. . . In (Christ"s) taking on the form of the slave, the from of despised dark (female) flesh there is the diclsoure (sic) of divinity, a disclosure that undoes the social arrangement of the colonial-racial tyranny (tynannos,), as the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor called it, that is the darker side of modernity

J. Kameron Carter

Sometimes, the most dangerous people were the ones you trusted most.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

Gregory Maguire

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

Joyce Carol Oates

She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.

Azar Nafisi

They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.

Alexander McCall Smith

Nature is increasingly the thematic focus of industrial heritage.

Carolyn Kitch

Many, if not most, of the miracles recorded in the Gospels can, in fact, be directly connected to the earlier miracle of the Creation. The same Being who, as Jehovah, organized the elements and framed the heavens and the earth was thus, as the Man of Galilee, able to control the winds and the waves. He could change water to wine, multiply loaves and fishes, heal bodies, and restore sight by the same power...that he had exercised in the beginning.

Eric D. Huntsman

It shall be an offence for any man, either a husband or other person of the male sex, married or otherwise, being over the age of twelve years, to throw any item of clothing having been worn by the said person for whatever length of time, upon the floor of any bathroom or any room adjacent to and connected to a bathroom, without good cause.

Alexander McCall Smith

If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

Donald Harington

Convincing a leader of the value of front-line ideas alone is rarely enough for that person to overcome years of entrenched bad habits and to change his management style.

Dean M. Schroeder

... just one more reminder that the rules are always different for girls, no matter who they are and no matter what they do.

Roxane Gay

What I know are simple truths. I know that the fabric of memory is reinforced by stories, rent by silences. I know that power dreads memory. I know that memory outlasts power's viciousness. I know . . . that a voiceless man is as good as dead.

Okey Ndibe

All belief is the least reliable form of knowing...Where there is a natural knowing of God, there is not need for belief. The highest form of certainty is something you know so thoroughly and so naturally that it's impossible to put into words.

Luke Rhinehart

One week after New Year's Day in 2006, I was on a flight to Aceh…As we walked down the steps on to the tarmac, the air felt humid and tropical, familiar and almost Balinese. It felt like going home. As the heavy air embraced me, my first inclination was to relax into it, but yet this was not home and my entire body remained on edge.

Alexandra Harris

Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?Is there icing on it? he'd said.Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.

George Saunders

The formal operational thinker has the ability to consider many different solutions to a problem before acting. This greatly increases efficiency, because the individual can avoid potentially unsuccessful attempts at solving a problem. The formal operational person considers past experiences, present demands, and future consequences in attempting to maximize the success of his or her adaptation to the world.

Neil J. Salkind

Work like hell, tell everyone everything you know, close a deal with a handshake, and have fun.

Harold Eugene Edgerton

Before I could turn to look up, a voice boomed from the heavens: "What the heck is going on down there?

Kat Falls

She had to lift both hands to illustrate what she meant, but he just let her carry his hand with her, not about to let go. She pushed the free hand toward the one he held, apparently trying to gesture closeness. "Warm," she said again. And then she did something that undid him to the last faint whisper of his soul: she gave his hand a squeeze with fingertips that could just barely reach around his, apparently using him to indicate what she wanted to say. He meant warmth. He meant this word she couldn't find.

Laura Florand

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