Quotes by Professors - Page 8

Worldly ambition inhibits true learning. Ask me. I know. A young man in a hurry is nearly uneducable: He knows what he wants and where he’s headed; when it comes to looking back or entertaining heretical thoughts, he has neither the time nor the inclination. All that counts is that he is going somewhere. Only as ambition wanes does education become a possibility.

Andrew J. Bacevich

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently—“shrewdly” and “reasonably”—she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection—a “hospital” infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance!

Joyce Carol Oates

You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

Sam Lipsyte

That's how ideas and the institutions they generate come to be in the first place. It is in strings of words that we make ideas. The words, however, can say anything that the language permits, which, in our case, is quite a lot, so a string of words can just as easily express inanities as ideas. When inanities are expressed, we can discover them just by paying attention to the words.

Richard Mitchell

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

Elie Wiesel

Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.

Gary Shteyngart

Birth, life, and death― each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.

Toni Morrison

You get lonely, is what it is. A person's not supposed to go through life with absolutely nobody. It's not normal. The longer you go by yourself the weirder you get, and the weirder you get the longer you go by yourself. It's a loop and you gotta do something to get out of it.

Jim Shepard

Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.

Gregory Maguire

Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.

Michael Eric Dyson

we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.

Thomas C. Foster

It's where we go and what we do when we get there that tells us who we are.

Joyce Carol Oates

Without pain, there is no call for anger, much less rampaging.

Adam Levin

We don't know what it's like not to be in love with you. We loved you the moment you looked at us, held our hand, danced dirty, kissed us. We were lost in you way before we even met, before the thought crossed your mind that you were bored and we were vaguely good-looking, interesting, exotic, fuckable. While you were weighing options, we were just hoping it wouldn't hurt too much — the fucking, or the falling in love, or the rejection. We didn’t get to choose. — Kai Cheng Thom to -----, 2013 (age 22)

Jeanette Lynes

I feel like a millionaire on the back of an armored jet-ski my samurai girlfriend who loves me is charging at a cartel speedboat to win a game of chicken. Isn’t this the day’s best part? You don’t even have to remember to enjoy it. It enjoys you into itself.

Adam Levin

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Joyce Carol Oates

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

Georges F. Doriot

To smile sincerely is acceptable after making mistakes – that is the best way to feel cheerful and repeat the same mistakes.

Eraldo Banovac

When the options are few, we can be happy with what we choose since we are confident that it is the best possible choice for us. When the options are practically infinite, though, we believe that the perfect choice for us must be out there somewhere and that it’s our responsibility to find it. Choosing can become a lose-lose situation: if we make a choice quickly without fully exploring the available options, we’ll regret potentially missing out on something better; if we do exhaustively consider all the options, we’ll expend more effort (which won’t necessarily increase the quality of our final choice), and if we discover other good options, we may regret that we can’t choose them all.

Sheena Iyengar

There is no better way to influence children than being their role model.

Eraldo Banovac

Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Adam Johnson

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it's there, because it can't hurt, and because what difference does it make?

Toni Morrison

Knowledge is the key driver of the progress of civilization.

Eraldo Banovac

She missed -- without knowing what she missed-- paints and crayons

Toni Morrison

People open bookstores because they want their souls back.(from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

Elizabeth Tallent

But for Mozart love is only the litmus test. To determine whether one is truly free or not.

André Brink

I have no special desire to go crawl around in caves, but I really like the word [spelunking] and want to use it in conversation. I do a lot of things just to use words I like.

Evan Mandery

When someone loves you, they always think you're beautiful. Those who don't see your beauty can't really see you at all.

Andrea Hurst

lmost everything looked more beautiful from a distance, the earth becoming more perfect as one ascended and came closer to seeing the world from God's eyes, man's hovels and palaces disappearing, the peaks and valleys of geography fading to become strokes of a paintbrush on a divine sphere.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Two things influence one's wisdom: remarkable experience and – evenmuch more – accumulated knowledge.

Eraldo Banovac

In the beginning, the call of God was not propositional. It was experiential. (p. 10)

Robin R. Meyers

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Anne Carson

To the grim poor there need be no pourquoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her--is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil...?

Gregory Maguire

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

Kenneth Koch

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

michael p naughton

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

Joyce Carol Oates

You are not the writer. You are the story being told from The Writer.

Richard Wisniewski

Congress has mandated an annual report on street gang, outlaw biker, and domestic extremist activity in the military since 2008.

Carter F. Smith

If we chose to refuse irony, we risk becoming irony's dupe.

Janet Beizer

In short, immaturity is spoiled. And what is spoiled doesn’t ripen. It goes bad early, gets bitter and withers on the vine.

Gina Barreca

We may end up with a life deferred by the business of its own collection.

Sherry Turkle

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

Steven Millhauser

There must have been a time, before Internet porn, when there wasn’t a script. Nowadays, everybody knows exactly how sex is supposed to go.

Paul Russell

He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.

T.C. Boyle

...these sleepless nights, when oddly enough my concentration was high, fueled perhaps by the effort to ignore the all-engrossing threat of bombs and rockets.

Azar Nafisi

Never forget those who helped you along the way

Heather Richardson Hayton

Bela had thought she knew what love felt like, but when she saw Sanjay at the airport after six long months, her heart gave a great, hurtful lurch, as though it were trying to leap out of her body to meet him. This, she thought. This is it. But it was only part of the truth. She would learn over the next years that love can feel a lot of different ways, and sometimes it can hurt a lot more.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Twice I'd come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one's roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through her pleasure she'd heard the front door open and close.

Aimee Bender

There will come a time when people will realize the greatest mysteries of the universe: will a human then meet anything other than himself?

Eraldo Banovac

Current public diplomacy and foreign policy making reduces the role of American citizens to mere spectators. The USIA's model of democracy and the free market is promoted as the superpower version of economic globalization, packaged and ready for shipping to clients throughout the world. In this version, foreign capital flows freely while the movement of people, particularly the world's poor, is strictly controlled. Such a commercial package speaks first and foremost for government 'partners,' the Fortune 500 corporations, which are the primary beneficiaries as well as the bankrollers of the American political process. This is a packaged story of America that is incomplete and undemocratic. Where do workers and communities fit into the story? How do private citizens play a part in building dialogue across cultures?

Nancy Snow

If I'd thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much - the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see.

Adam Levin

Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; the object is a ‘fact’ which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.

Edward Said

There are all kinds of psychological disorders in the West that don't exist in Asia.

Amy Chua

If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?

Paul Russell

You bear a sword and shield, remind meof her labor, her stoning gaze. What beastwill your blade free next? What call will you loosefrom another woman's throat?

Donika Kelly

In the end, all disguises must drop.

Gregory Maguire

But the truth, I realize now, is that I always hoped. Even if I knew my hope was a lie, I held on to it.

Joshua David Bellin

It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.

Dan Chaon

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