Quotes by Academics - Page 13

Cultures produce myths because they satisfy a deep-rooted human need: the need to make sense of life. Myths are appealing because they reduce the complexity of experience, by making things seem simple and absolute; myths define popular realities which are accepted readily, even uncritically.
Matthew Screech
Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia
Maybe the world isn't enough, or maybe the distinction between the world and fiction is not so clear. Fiction is made from the stuff of the world, after all, which includes dreams and wishes and fantasies and memory. And it is never really made alone, but from the material between and among us: language.
Siri Hustvedt
In real life nothing means anything. Stuff happens and there just is no structure.
Scarlett Thomas
Perhaps, she thought, that’s what love does. It’s not there to make you feel special. It’s to make you brave. It was like a ration pack in the desert, she thought, like a box of matches in a dark wood. Love and courage, thought Sophie—two words for the same thing.
Katherine Rundell
Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?
J.M. Coetzee
If I am to be a skeleton in a box buried deep into the ground, I pray you will be the dust that rests atop my bones.
John Hennessy
The world had edges but you couldn’t see them going, only when you were trying to come back.
Kathryn Davis
Just because the world often seemed to reward ugliness was no excuse to give up on beauty.
Kathryn Davis
Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven't asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go.
Clay Christensen
while "freedom" from magic is certainly invoked as a constitutive element of modern modes of subjectivity, this freedom is purchased only at the price of potent new forms of social control and regimenta
Randall Styers
Social power is at stake in theory-making, but the workings of this power are often unacknowledged -- and overdeter
Randall Styers
[Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human cu
Randall Styers
In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51)
Saul Bellow
Masculinity cannot exist without femininity. On its own, masculinity has no meaning, because it is but one half of a set of power relations. Masculinity pertains to male dominance as femininity pertains to female subordination.
Sheila Jeffreys
Our view of the mind not only shapes our view of ourselves; less obviously, it also shapes our view of that part of our experience we conceive of as dealing with the external world. As we learn about the structure of this aspect of experience, we find that the world presents itself to consciousness only after being mediated to lesser or (more often) greater extents by mental structures and processes.
Sean O Nuallain
Mental ghettos are not mirages; they actually exist in palpable reality: being "open" inside one's mental or intellectual ghetto does not open its door but simply allows one to harbour the illusion that there is no ghetto and no door. The most dangerous prisons are those with invisible bars.
Tariq Ramadan
The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That's the troublewith women,
Joanna Russ
In any East Asian culture, you will find that women have a very tangible power within the household. This is often rejcted by non-Asian feminists who argue that it is not real power, but.. Japanese women look at the low status attributed to the domestic labor of housewives in North America and feel that this amounts to a denigration of a fundamental social role - whether it is performed by a man or a woman.
Sandra Buckley
... sometimes love becomes a power game between ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves.
Witi Ihimaera
... the love which Kahu received from Koro Apirana was the sort that dropped off the edge of the table, like breadcrumbs after everybody else has had a big meal.
Witi Ihimaera
Moses loved his relatives quite openly and even helplessly . . . It was childish of him; he knew that. He could only sigh at himself, that he should be so undeveloped on that significant side of his nature.
Saul Bellow
We drank coffee. We talked. She loved Charles Dickens, whom she read in Norwegian. Years after she was dead, I wrote a dissertation on Dickens, and though my study of the great man would no doubt have alarmed her, I had a funny feeling that by taking on the English novelist I was returning to my Norwegian roots.
Siri Hustvedt
The weight of God's love for humanity cannot be determined. But felt with a grateful heart.
David Nii Sowah Kobbina Adjei
There. We can be friends now.""Someone like you could never be my friend.""Why ever not?""Because I'm a nice person, and you're a sick, twisted bitch.
John Hennessy
When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all—because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.
Eva Hoffman
You will find yourself, as he did. But that will not mean it is easy. There are few things easy in life that are worth the doing.
Mette Ivie Harrison
I looked inward at my heart. And indeed, there too, the criss-cross corsetry was slackened and gaping. I was all undone. Potentially, I could spill. Or tangle. And so I began to tug at my own heartstrings, pulling them up tight until there was just the right amount of tension at each criss and each cross. Then I bent down to my boots and laced them firmly too, first the left, then the right, finishing off on each side with a surgeon's shoelace knot.
Danielle Wood
It’s time to ask why [the United States] is the only country in the world where we permit our children to be saddled with tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars of debt before they begin to earn a penny.
F.H. Buckley
If music can shine, Sophie thought, this music shone... 'It's like eight thousand birds, Charles!'When the music closed, she clapped until the rest of the audience had stopped and until her hands were hot and blotched with red... There was something in the music that felt familiar to Sophie. 'It feels,' she said to Charles, 'like home.
Katherine Rundell
Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.
J.M. Coetzee
I discovered, however, in the early days of our marriage that, in having her way, she put my interests ahead of her own.
Saul Bellow
Why is it that married people always say "Come in" when everything they do says "Get out"? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.
Malcolm Bradbury
Meanwhile, Susan looked carefully into each of our faces. She was actually waiting for us to answer, to give reasons why people fall in love and get married. Nobody knows, I wanted to say. Nobody really knows. But that doesn't mean you're allowed to not do it.
Rebecca Lee
And yet, I have not wronged you, have I? Indeed if there is anyone I may have sinned against, it is me. That desiring you as I do, needing you as I do, I still let you go.
Ama Ata Aidoo
You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
Saul Bellow
George stared at the dove. What would she say if she could speak to him? What would she wish for, for her father? For she, too, had been harmed by a man who had meant to show his utmost love for her.It made George wonder why love was suppose to be such a wonderful thing. As far as he could tell, love was just another excuse for causing pain.
Mette Ivie Harrison
It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.
J.M. Coetzee
Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.
Camille Paglia
Everything is melting in nature. We think we see objects, but our eyes are slow and partial. Nature is blooming and withering in long puffy respirations, rising and falling in oceanic wave-motion. A mind that opened itself fully to nature without sentimental preconception would be glutted by nature’s coarse materialism, its relentless superfluity. An apple tree laden with fruit: how peaceful, how picturesque. But remove the rosy filter of humanism from our gaze and look again. See nature spuming and frothing, its mad spermatic bubbles endlessly spilling out and smashing in that inhuman round of waste, rot, and carnage. From the jammed glassy cells of sea roe to the feathery spores poured into the air from bursting green pods, nature is a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill. This is the chthonian black magic with which we are infected as sexual beings; this is the daemonic identity that Christianity so inadequately defines as original sin and thinks it can cleanse us of. Procreative woman is the most troublesome obstacle to Christianity’s claim to catholicity, testified by its wishful doctrines of Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth. The procreativeness of chthonian nature is an obstacle to all of western metaphysics and to each man in his quest for identity against his mother. Nature is the seething excess of being.
Camille Paglia
Man might carve his mark on the earth but unless he's vigilant, Nature will take it all back.
Witi Ihimaera
In fact, the advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine - that is not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification - enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.
Annette Kolodny
The word "landmark" is from the old English "landmearc", meaning 'an object in the landscape which, by its conspicuousness, serves as a guide in the direction of one's course.
Robert Macfarlane
The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.
Brian Morton
Yes.Work is love made visible.
Ama Ata Aidoo
Without meaningful work you might as well be dead.
Joanna Russ
I was once driven north along Central Park, all the way from Chinatown. We hailed the cab in front of a building where Orthodox Jews still lived, so they shut down an elevator on Saturdays. In the taxi, I was with my mother. We were visiting her aunt, my great aunt, who was 93. She had no memory of the old country, Lithuania, but she'd been born there. Her parents escaped the pogroms so she could survived a century here. Her American prosperity was half a century of subsistence wages and thirty years of Medicare in an elevator building. The old country for the cab driver was Bangladesh, and he was a talker. He'd just graduated from college, and his prospects were good. He'd majored in a practical field, network engineering or something like that. Young and optimistic, he spoke fluent English. His big idea was to keep his countrymen out of the United States. America was great, but if he got overrun with foreigners, his kind in particular, it would be ruined. "Bangladesh is hot and crowded. Why would want to make America like that." He said this in all sincerity.
Alex Kudera
More commonly suffering breaks people, crushes them, and is simply unilluminating. You see how gruesomely human beings are destroyed by pain, when they have the added torment of losing their humanity first, so that their death is a total defeat...
Saul Bellow
Change biology, and you could change society--but could you change society on its own? Were we as a species simply condemned to permanent misery, all because of how we have evolved?This was the conundrum that the Oankali books had posed to her, and the Parables had been intended (but failed) to solve: How do you create a more sustainable, more benign, more livable society when you're stuck working with human beings?
Gerry Canavan
History, memory - that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death'. For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.
Saul Bellow
Still, I never heard him say that he hated or wanted to hurt or kill someone for all the horrific things that had been happening to him and his family.
Savo Heleta
And this is the unwritten history of man, his unseen, negative accomplishment, his power to do without gratification for himself provided there is something great, something into which his being, and all beings can go. He does not need meaning as long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning.
Saul Bellow
We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.
Angela Y. Davis
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson
Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all I can borrow.
Woodrow Wilson
Believing is not thinking something is true, Shireen. It is acting for the truth.
Ian Baucom
Believing, too, that is not enough. You cannot just believe. Your belief must have a purpose.
Ian Baucom
No harm in listening. Alexei's a child, not a wizard. We don't lose control of our brains by listening.
Katherine Rundell