Quotes by Academics - Page 8

...the beginning and the end of time. These are the same thing, as everybody knows who came into this universe via a wormhole.
Kathryn Davis
Secular humanists of every type may ridicule the Bible, but they cannot escape it; and in their obsession with change, calls for reform, doomsday warnings, and utopian visions, they continue to steal from it.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
The handless clock trying to holdthe hour of death, saltin the last mouthful of water.The windows opaque with silence,silence stagnating in the wineglass.
Warren Heiti
In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some word unspoken, I believe. Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story.
J.M. Coetzee
Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.
Saul Bellow
Ignorance is not bad faith. But persistence in ignorance is.
Joanna Russ
Even if I am not the honestest type in the world I don't want to lie more than is average.
Saul Bellow
I wrenched open the windows. I stood while the cold air poured around my face like dark water, as if I was a rock and it was chiselling me into a new shape.
Sue Woolfe
Humans are animals and like all animals we leave tracks as we walk: signs of passage made in snow, sand, mud, grass, dew, earth or moss.... We easily forget that we are track-markers, through, because most of our journeys now occur on asphalt and concrete--and these are substances not easily impressed.
Robert Macfarlane
I come to listen to your pain and to hear the stories and memories of a few obsessed citizens. Jerusalem, I come to you in disguise: in over-colourful, immodest clothes and vulgar make-up... The only way I could come to you was in disguise, as a whore.
Suad Amiry
Today, unlocking the room and stepping into its dusty embrace, it struck her – the bareness, the cobwebs in the corners, the dark squares on the walls where the maps had once hung, the intricately designed tiles disappeared in filth, the urn-less, roseless emptiness, the laughter that once was. Sighs everywhere, and echoes, the papery trail of ants through the ancient wood, the still, suspended sheets of dust, and through it all, those memories, still alive, still alive.
Debotri Dhar
Is that the secret meaning of the word story, do you think: a storing place of memories?
J.M. Coetzee
Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.
Saul Bellow
Humans, not places, make memories.
Ama Ata Aidoo
He knew what retributions your devils are liable to bring for the way you treat your wife and women or behave while your father is on his deathbed, what you ought to think of your pleasure, of acting like a cockroach; he had the intelligence for the comparison. He had the intelligence to be sublime. But sublimity can't exist only as a special gift of the few, due to an accident of origin, like being born an albino. If it were, what interest would we have in it?
Saul Bellow
But if you take pleasure in morality, then you are always in deficit.
Brian Castro
One doesn't commit evil actions in the belief that one is acting wrongly. What allows one to commit such acts is the belief that it will contribute to a greater good.
Una McCormack
We are our own worst enemy.
Una McCormack
. . . [T]o live in an inspired condition, to know truth, to be free, to love another, to consummate existence, to abide with death in clarity of consciousness - without which, racing and conniving to evade death, the spirit holds its breath and hopes to be immortal because it does not live - is no longer a rarefied project. Just as machinery has embodied ideas of good, so the technology of destruction has also acquired a metaphysical character. The practical questions have thus become the ultimate questions as well. Annihilation is no longer a metaphor. Good and Evil are real. The inspired condition is therefore no visionary matter. It is not reserved for gods, kings, poets, priests, shrines, but belongs to mankind and to all of existence.
Saul Bellow
In 2015, the writer Alex Blank Millard engaged in her own gender-swap experiment to highlight the misogynist nature of online abuse. Sick of constantly receiving rape threats from ‘faceless eggs’ online, she changed her Twitter profile photo to that of a white man – but kept the content she posted the same. When Millard tweeted about rape culture, fat shaming, and systemic oppression as Lady Alex, the standard response was a deluge of rape and death threats, and a bunch of guys calling her fat. When she commented on the same things as Straight- and Cis-Looking White Dude Alex, she was retweeted, favourited, and even cited by Buzzfeed (Millard, 2015).
Emma A. Jane
…the blogosphere is the friend of information but the enemy of thought.
Alan Jacobs
Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.
Katherine Rundell
You will always be the answer, when somebody asks me what I'm thinking about.
Lisa Brooks
The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I'm a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues.
Malcolm Bradbury
Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.
Scarlett Thomas
Besides, who is to say that the feelings he writes in his diary are his true feelings? Who is to say that at each moment while the pen moves he is truly himself? At one moment he might truly be himself, at another he might simply be making things up. How can one know for sure? Why should he even want to know for sure?
J.M. Coetzee
Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly.Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used to it, she could not be hurt further. But he saw her neck grow stiffer and stiffer.
Mette Ivie Harrison
The high road is littered with pot shots.
Debra Crown
George was full of hatred. Of his own weakness and stupidity, of his magic, of the stubbornness and the pride of Beatrice and Marit, and, last of all, hatred of Dr. Gharn, who had started it all.But the hatred swayed to pity. Then to hopelessness. Then back to anger.Every once in a great while, he felt a moment of peace, usually when he caught a glimpse of Beatrice and Marit together. He loved them both in different ways. But that could not be.He turned away, and the cycle began again.
Mette Ivie Harrison
Christianity, in contrast, is for all cultures. This is a theme of the New Testament, St. John’s vision of the redeemed in Revelation 7. Christianity is for every tribe, every nation, every language, every time, for every culture. That’s really quite unique from other religions because Christ died for the sins of the world.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.
Clayton M. Christensen
Culture is the celebration of diversity. Let us therefore not deny our origin; but instead celebrate ours as a cultural mosaic not a tower of Babel , but a power of Babel
Ali A. Mazrui
Being postmodern, however, is about being complicit rather than virtuous, it is about approaching categories like Good and Evil with a certain ironic skepticism.
Veronica Hollinger
[T]here are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.
Raymond Williams
There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Siri Hustvedt
Before we come to Christ, we must come to ourselves.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
The 'tragedy' of the slow growth of immortalism pertains mostly to them, and perhaps to you – not so much to me or to us, the committed immortalists. We already have made our arrangements for cryostasis after clinical death – signed our contracts with existing organizations and allocated the money. We will have our chance, and with a little bit of luck will 'taste the wine of centuries unborn'.
Robert C.W. Ettinger
I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.
Scarlett Thomas
I believe language is infinitely malleable, a live being in our hands, which deserves our great respect and curiosity
Brian Kiteley
Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.
S.I. Hayakawa
No special academic expertise is required for insight into the Orwellian use of language, only clear thinking and common sense.
Peter Slezak
Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.
Robert Macfarlane
I know that language will be a crucial instrument, that I can overcome the stigma of my marginality, the weight of presumption against me, only if the reassuringly right sounds come out of my mouth.
Eva Hoffman
As you speak I swear I can hear words being selected, one after another, from the word-box you carry around with you, and slotted into place. That is not how a true native speak, one who is born into a language.’‘How does a native speak?’‘From the heart. Words well up within and he sings them, sings along with them. So to speak.
J.M. Coetzee
He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.
J.M. Coetzee
Few people...have had much training in listening. The training of most oververbalized professional intellectuals is in the opposite direction. Living in a competitive culture, most of us are most of the time chiefly concerned with getting our own views across, and we tend to find other people's speeches a tedious interruption of the flow of our own ideas.
S.I. Hayakawa
That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.
Siri Hustvedt
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.
Siri Hustvedt
Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.
Siri Hustvedt
Accumulated experience always alters perception of the past.
Siri Hustvedt
But how wonderful when the tale is told,And the message that is meant for usOpens like the scents of a mountain flower!
Mazisi Kunene
OnceThere was a quiet island,With a name.You must believe me When I say that sunlight, Impure but beautiful, Broke upon the bay, silveredThe unrepentant, burning moon.
Edwin Thumboo
Beneath it allI kept faith with Ithaca, travelled,Travelled and travelled,Suffering much, enjoying a little;Met strange people singingNew myths; made myths myself.But this lion of the seaSalt-maned, scaly, wondrous of tail,Touched with power, insistentOn this brief promontory...Puzzles.
Edwin Thumboo
Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.
Ian McGuire
The burned corpses of the doppelgängers of Hitler and Braun, numerous false leads, meticulously orchestrated evidence, misdirection, and other diversions now being set in place will confuse the Americans and Russians, Zeller knew, and, in the end, put them at each other’s throats.
Paul Majkut
At the entrance of the Führerbunker, a dandelion pushed through the crack between cobblestones. The cadet did not notice that he stepped on it as they entered the bunker. A dark cloud of smoke rose from a burning ministry. Zeller fantasized that the filth that surrounded him was cleansed. He saw himself, a portly and tailored leader in a white uniform with gold epaulets, buttons, and stripes. He imagined himself in an immaculate, white city in Antarctica.
Paul Majkut
There are limits to human beings and science, and fiction is one way to expose those limits. --Ono Norihiro
Patrick W. Galbraith
You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.
Malcolm Bradbury
I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.
Saul Bellow
The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.
Siri Hustvedt