Quotes by Academics - Page 10

I urge you: don't cut short these thought-trains of yours. Follow them through to their end. Your thoughts and your feelings. Follow them through and you will grow with them.
J.M. Coetzee
I know what you might be thinking here on your own, but those thoughts won’t last for ever,’ I said. ‘You won’t always feel like this. This will pass. Homer will be here for you, and the sun will rise and you’ll find your reasons again. The ones you think have deserted you. Isn’t that right, Meg?
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
But he wasn't really thinking properly. It was as if the thoughts were chasing each other round and round his head without managing to catch up with each other.
Isabel Hoving
Though most tourists accepted the occasional comic misadventure, it was important to them that overall their vacation should be pleasant. When you spend money on a holiday you are essentially purchasing happiness: if you don't enjoy yourself you will feel defrauded.
Alison Lurie
What's supposed to happen, at the end of a quest? Cheers and accolades, Josh knew; people throw their hats in the air, and you glow with pride as they lift you to their shoulders. What else? Medals, speeches and a great feast, and then a ballad about your exploits, and finally, as the fireworks go off overhead, a soft, clean, fresh bed.
Isabel Hoving
It seemed like an original act, the very kindest act of being human, that he listened.
Sue Woolfe
George put his hand on top of Beatrice's and felt the warmth of both the woman and her hound pulsing through his fingers. "Just because your father does not see your victory does not mean that it is none," he said softly.
Mette Ivie Harrison
(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution.
J.M. Coetzee
There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.
J.M. Coetzee
Empathy is a special application of the imagination. The ability to imagine what it would be like to experience what someone else is experiencing can be crucial to moral sensitivity.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
Mercy ministry always comes down to this: you can help, but only Jesus can heal.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
I would not be practicing love toward God OR my neighbour if I were to smile benignly on an unjust social order. It is not charitable to refrain from moral judgment: when Jesus says 'Judge not, lest ye be judged," he is forbidding condemnation, not discernment. There are times indeed when Christian charity demands that one speak forcibly.
Alan Jacobs
True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
Siri Hustvedt
Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age.
Camille Paglia
Sometimes I long to forget… It is painful to be conscious of two worlds.
Eva Hoffman
When it comes to Jews, you have a two-thousand-year memory, but when it comes to us Palestinians, you have a sixty-year amnesia.
Suad Amiry
We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places -- retreated to most often when we are most remote from them -- are among the most important landscapes we possess.
Robert Macfarlane
Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.''Don't you have a photograph?''Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.
Siri Hustvedt
In this early memory he looks different from the way I would remember him later.
Siri Hustvedt
It may be that I link every library to that first one - to my early childhood experience of drawing on the floor near my father's desk. A library is of course a real place, but it is also an unreal one. What happens there is mostly silent. I think I've always liked the whispering aspect of libraries, the hushing librarians and my feeling of solitude among many.
Siri Hustvedt
What she remembered is undoubtedly something so radically different from the image I gave to her memory that the two may be incompatible.
Siri Hustvedt
My memory of the school building itself, its rooms and lockers, blackboards, and hallways, bring on a heavy, oppressive feeling. Whether I was more unhappy in school than any of my friends I don't know. I never would have said I didn't like school, and there are moments I distinctly remember enjoying, but these truths don't alter my memory of that place.
Siri Hustvedt
It can only be that places left behind often become emotionally simplified - that they sound a single note of pain or pleasure, which means that they are never what they were.
Siri Hustvedt
Infancy is irretrievable. Its memories live underground. To what extent they return by stealth or are triggered by various catalysts remains an ongoing question.
Siri Hustvedt
Memory changes as a person matures.
Siri Hustvedt
Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
Siri Hustvedt
Homeopaths argue that water has a memory.
Scarlett Thomas
Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.
Siri Hustvedt
Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.
Siri Hustvedt
You're not crazy. In fact, you're perfect. Everything about you couldnt be more so if I made a list of all the qualities I wanted in a partner and special ordered you.
Bonnie Erina Wheeler
That night, Gregory dreamt of his mother. It was a dream that he'd have carried to his therapist like a raw, precious egg if he'd had a therapist, and the dream made him wish he had one. In the dream, he sat in the kitchen of his mother's house at the table on his usual place. He could hear her handle pots and pans and sigh occasionally. Sitting there filled his heart with sadness and also with a long missed feeling of comfort until he realised that the chair and the table were much too small for him: it was a child's chair and he could barely fit his long legs under the table. He was worried that his mother might scold him for being so large and for not wearing pants. Gregory, in the dream, felt his manhood press against his belly while he was crouching uncomfortably, not daring to move.
Marcus Speh
All memories fade away in the end. Then, only dreams are left. And because they are all we have, we confide our life’s worries to them.
Philippe Forest
Peace can be fragile and peace can be ugly and peace can be wrong. Peace built on lies is no peace at all.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Research has found that in most companies managers who get promoted rapidly spend most of their time networking and politicking, while their more effective colleagues spent their time building their units and developing their people.
Alan G. Robinson
Disruption is, at its core, a really powerful idea.
Clayton M. Christensen
That's the positive aspect of trade I suppose. The world gets stirred up together. That's about as much as I have to say for it.
Isabel Hoving
My lady Silk, remember that a man always gains in stature any way he chooses to associate with a woman - including adultery...but in her association with a man, a woman is always in danger of being diminished.
Ama Ata Aidoo
No true friendship takes account of credit and debt. It gives freely, without thought of compensation or reward.
Una McCormack
I’d never have predicted I would lose touch with him – before, that is, I did. I thought I had my reasons. But it turns out that they weren’t good reasons. It turns out that you should never lose contact with the people who are supposed to be important in your life. There is no excuse in doing that.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like.
Woodrow Wilson
Eroticism is mystique; that is, the aura of emotion and imagination around sex. It cannot be 'fixed' by codes of social or moral convenience, whether from the political left or right. For nature's fascism is greater than that of any society. There is a daemonic instability in sexual relations that we may have to accept.
Camille Paglia
No doubt I would have felt reverent in less lovely places, because I imagined a past I connected to myself.
Siri Hustvedt
I imagined Stephen's companion was a beautiful woman. Her form and coloring changed with my moving thoughts, but the idea that she existed remained to nag at me, and even though she was only a spook of my jealousy, I couldn't stop the surge of fantasies about her and Stephen. By the time I left the library, I had invented several elaborate plots involving the two of them.
Siri Hustvedt
I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.
Siri Hustvedt
The truth is that what fascinates me is not so much being in a place as not being there: how places live in the mind once you have left them, how they are imagined before you arrive, or how they are seemingly called out of nothing to illustrate a thought or story like my tree down yonder. These mental spaces map our Innes lives more fully than any "real" map, delineating the borders of here and there that also shape what we see in the present.
Siri Hustvedt
Immigration inevitably involves error and revision. What I imagined it would be, it's not. For better or worse, some mistake is unavoidable.
Siri Hustvedt
The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.
Siri Hustvedt
All human accomplishment has this same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature. Is this not enough to make a person full of ecstasy? Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!
Saul Bellow
Treece quite seriously divided the world into writers, who led life as a conscious effort, and people, and people who didn't; sometimes he preferred writers and sometimes he preferred people.
Malcolm Bradbury
With my sort of book there's no resolution, because there's no solution. The problems aren't answered in the end because there is no answer. They're problems that are handed on to the reader, not solved for him so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful world. It's not a beautiful world.
Malcolm Bradbury
Oh, God,” Wilhelm prayed, “Let me out of my trouble. Let me out of my thoughts, and let me do something better with myself. For all the time I have wasted I am very sorry. Let me out of this clutch and into a different life. For I am all balled up. Have mercy.
Saul Bellow
Because I knew so much about him, because I had been close to him, I couldn't bring the various fragments of my experience with him into a single coherent image. The truth was mobile and contradictory, and I was willing to live with that.
Siri Hustvedt
What amazes me most is that we, as a people, have shared our collective story of being thrown out of our homeland, Palestine, with each other and with many others- actually we have bored the world with this collective story- but somehow the individual Palestinian shies away, or perhaps is too afraid, to share the very personal story of being thrown out of her or his home, living room, or bedroom. These personal stories are seldom told, not even to our own children, perhaps not even to ourselves. I guess the wound remains open.
Suad Amiry
Even after she was gone, he passed her place each day: something white in a high window - not a face,but the white belly of a pigeon beating its wingsagainst the pane in the boarded-up house.
Zoë Brigley
When it comes to the crunch, coming out is the greatest of all confessions. Nothing is more difficult to acknowledge. When we become ourselves we reach right back to the time when we were conceived out of our parents’ passion. We murder their lives. There can never be any forgiveness.
Witi Ihimaera
If I didn't work on the assumption that people were mostly telling me the truth, I think I'd go mad... And I'd rather be mistaken about others than mistrustful of them.
Una McCormack
Sometimes you have to trust grownups, perhaps more so when they are not there to actually supervise you.
Scarlett Thomas
Purification in Shinto lifts the burden from the shoulders of the individual and washes it away.
Stuart D.B. Picken
From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.
Robert Macfarlane
So, are there other paths, lifestyles or value systems to consider? Of course, there are plenty. I suggest one alternative here: a meditative life centred on God, which means to have Him in mind in our thoughts, words and deeds as much as we humanly can. And that is where ‘God-centred meditation’ comes in. Simply put, God plays the central role in my perspective on life and in my meditation philosophy and techniques. I believe that unless we connect to God through His Name and His life-giving, transformative Word found in the primary sources of the world’s great religions, we will not experience true, lasting joy and peace in life.
Farnaz Masumian