Quotes by Academics - Page 9

Goodreads.com is actually about fiction not dreading goo. But I have a profile there, anyway...
Michael A. Arnzen
We're supposed to love flowers, yet we rip them from their homes, and give them to people who don't love us."-Toril Withers (Dark Winter).
John Hennessy
Person 1: "Stay back....I have a demon inside of me."Person 2: "Let me get closer...I have a hell inside me where your demons can live."(from Dark Winter, #2 - out Halloween 2014)
John Hennessy
Insanity is the only real escape from the banality of our lives. - Clara Bayliss
John Hennessy
The cabin in the woods is to the American Gothic what the haunted castle is to the European - the seed from which everything else ultimately grows.
Bernice M Murphy Dr
You know what’s worse than burying your own child? Not burying your own child.
John Hennessy
Arguably, horror may be understood as a fictional indulgence in fantasies of violence, and our fascination with it seen as a form of sublimation of repressed desires. If we accept this line of thinking, then horror has the benefit of, at least, being one of the most honest of genres.
Xavier Aldana Reyes
What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon.
Scarlett Thomas
To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.
J.M. Coetzee
Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else.
A.J. Hartley
A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?
Saul Bellow
A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.
J.M. Coetzee
Brother raises a hand against brother and son against father (how terrible!) and the father also against son. And moreover it is a continuity-matter, for if the father did not strike the son, they would not be alike. It is done to perpetuate similarity. Oh, Henderson, man cannot keep still under the blows.... A hit B? B hit C?--we have not enough alphabet to cover the condition. A brave man will try to make the evil stop with him. He shall keep the blow. No man shall get it from him, and that is a sublime ambition.
Saul Bellow
But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.
Malcolm Bradbury
Correlation is not cause, it is just a 'music of chance'.
Siri Hustvedt
It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.
Woodrow Wilson
There is only one thing to do when you meet the Living God; you must fall on your face and repent of your sins. Repentance is bittersweet business; Repentance is not just a conversion exercise -- it is the posture of the Christian, much like 'tree' or 'full lotus' is the posture of the Yogi. Repentance is our daily fruit, our hourly washing, our minute by minute wake-up call; our reminder of God's creation, Jesus' blood, and the Holy Spirit's comfort. Repentance is the only no shame solution to a renewed Christian conscience, because it only proves the obvious: God was right all along.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Speaking the words he had been taught, directing them no longer upward but to the earth on which he knelt, he prayed: 'For what we are about to receive make us truly thankful.' ... he... felt his heart suddenly flow over with thankfulness... like a gush of warm water... All that remains is to live here quietly for the rest of my life, eating food that my own labour has made the earth to yield. All that remains is to be a tender of the soil.
J.M. Coetzee
Refusing the false securities of a stable and linear past, such an approach celebrates heterogeneous sensations and surprising associations, random connections, the ongoing construction of meaning and also admits into its orbit the mysterious agency of artifacts, space and non-humans from the past.
Tim Edensor
The ocean was waiting with grand and bitter provocations, as if it invited you to think how deep it was, how much colder than your blood or saltier, or to outguess it, to tell which were its feints or passes and which its real intentions, meaning business.
Saul Bellow
Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.
Robert Macfarlane
Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.
Siri Hustvedt
But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.
Naomi Wood
Ann put the oven to heat. She washed the lamb under the tap, turning it around to clean the entire leg. Then it was dried with a paper towel, stretched out on the cutting board to be hammered flat, and rubbed with salt and rosemary she took from the kitchen window. She waited for the oven to reach two hundred. The cleaned scent of the meat and the clatter of the water in the skink, the branches of rosemary, the dogs finding each other’s ears in the evening, the children being called indoors, servants standing on the road for the Indian bus, and the rising heat of the oven against the remaining heat of the day made her aware of her own happiness. This happiness was like the sea wind when the temperature of the water and the land reversed and everything was free in new darkness.
Imraan Coovadia
Genitals are a great distraction to scholarship
Malcolm Bradbury
Let me introduce you. Sophie, this is Miss Eliot, from the National Childcare Agency. Miss Eliot, this is Sophie, from the ocean.
Katherine Rundell
He was thirty-six years old, and six foot three. He spoke English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds. He had once nearly killed himself trying to read and ride a horse at the same time.
Katherine Rundell
Can you imagine life without the horror genre? There would be no monsters. Only a**holes.
Michael A. Arnzen
Healing comes through God's work, and God deals differently with us when we deal differently with him.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Gerbert, by the window, shuddered; his mouth contorted. The witch began to twist faster and faster while her twin was talking to Gisela, mumbling to her, marching old holy words straight through the child’s ear into her skull, where they entered the bloodstream and looked for the enemy. The monk’s fingers twitched in the same rhythm and he found himself falling into a trance. He knew it would be dangerous to witness the witches brewing and dancing but there was an energy in it that he’d missed badly since he’d been asked to educate the young princess. Gerbert didn’t even notice when the hags stopped, tucked the girl in, rubbed the concoction on her lips and left for the unseen place from which they had come. Gisela healed quickly thereafter: The fever fell that same night and she asked for solid food the next morning. She had no memory of what had happened, but when she bounced on one leg across the meadow in the castle yard, she chanted a little melody that had not been heard in church, an odd melody that made Gerbert’s ears prick up because he sensed the uncanny in it.
Marcus Speh
The Black Woman is amazingly strong, truly powerful, deeply visionary, has incredible worth and much love and goodness within that she is willing to share. She is to be honoured, yet must begin first to see and honour all of this (and much more) within and about herself. Let us see this more in who we truly are and live, when we do, we will attract more of the greatness that we absolutely deserve.
Rebecca Gordon
Who ask don't getwho don't ask don't wantwho don't want don't getwho don't getdon't care
Merle Hodge
Living according to God's standards is an acquired taste.
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.
Siri Hustvedt
I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something.
Siri Hustvedt
There's a rule, I think. You get what you want in life, but not your second choice too.
Alison Lurie
Just then his state of being was so curious that he was compelled , himself, to see it -- eager, grieving, fantastic, dangerous, crazed and, to the point of death, "comical." It was enough to make a man pray to God to remove this great, bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development, give himself, a failure, back to the species for a primitive cure.
Saul Bellow
The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else--a learning experience, a trial, a reinvention--no longer the static concept of failure.
Sarah Lewis
The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature.
J.M. Coetzee
The truth a fairly important thing to hold on to when you’ve been pulled out of the sea after wanting to drown in it. I could’ve let the sea take me. I could easily be dead now, which is funny when you think of it. When I say funny, what I actually mean is weird and kind of disturbing.When there’s the loud sound of a siren screaming in your head it doesn’t take too long before a feeling of not caring what happens washed over you and you become recklessly self- destructive. I used to be full of energy and happiness but I could barely remember those kinds of feelings. The cheerful, childish things I used to think had been replaced. A whole load of new realisations had begun to grow inside me like tangled weeds, and they were starting to kill me. That’s why I’d make the decision that involved heading ogg to the pier on my pike in the middle of the night and cycling off it.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
I steered by self as evenly as I could, and it was easier than I thought. My bike and I went shooting off the end, and together we well into the sea that’s cold and huge and doesn’t care whether living boys launch themselves into it or not.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald
From where would failed Americans leap if all of our towering buildings were razed to the ground? He envisions inflated airfares to Niagara Falls; renewed interest in the nations dams and gorges; long lines at the Grand Canyon, potential suicides being asked to take a numbered ticket, to wait their turn. Couldn't Al Qaeda see that we are killing our own well enough? Competitive society creates deep-rooted feelings of failure. On our own we succeed at self-termination; America needs no foreign aid from these murderers.
Alex Kudera
I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I've had all the monstrosity I want.
Saul Bellow
I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. 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
Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.
Siri Hustvedt
Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.
J.M. Coetzee
We are victims of our history and our present. They place too many obstacles in the way of love. And we cannot enjoy even our differences in peace.
Ama Ata Aidoo
It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all.
Siri Hustvedt
A great thinker does not necessarily have to discover a master idea but has to rediscover and to affirm a true but forgotten, ignored or misunderstood master idea and interpret it in all the diverse aspects of thought not previously done, in a powerful and consistent way, despite surrounding ignorance and opposition. This criterion we think would include all prophets and their true followers among the Muslim scholars. He is both a great and original thinker who brings new meanings and interpretations to old ideas, thereby providing both continuity and originality to the important intellectual and cultural problems of his time and through it, of mankind. Thus the brilliant interpretations of scholars and sages like al-Ghazali and Mulla Sadra then, and Iqbal and al-Attas now, deserve to be recognized and acknowledged as manifesting certain qualities of greatness and originality.
Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud
...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.
Tariq Ramadan
You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.
Kathryn Davis
The doctrine of vocation deals with how God works through human beings to bestow His gifts. God gives us this day our daily bread by means of the farmer the banker, the cooks, And the lady at the check-out counter. He creates new life – the most amazing miracle of all – by means of mothers and fathers. He protects us by means of the police officers, firemen, and our military. He creates. Through artists. He heals by working through doctors, nurses, and others whom He has gifted, equipped, and called to the medical professions.
Gene Edward Veith Jr.
The greatest form of betrayal is self-betrayal."-Dr Renu S Persaud
Renu Persaud PhD
If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.
Margaret Elphinstone
The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat, how can we conjure spirit from a bone?
Ian McGuire
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.
Saul Bellow
There are extremes within any population, but on average, at least among young adults, those who feel lonely actually spend no more time alone than do those who feel more connected. They are no more or less physically attractive than average, and they do not differ, on average, from the non-lonely in terms of height, weight, age, education, or intelligence. Most important, when we look at the broad continuum (rather than just the extremes) of people who feel lonely, we find that they have the capacity to be just as socially adept as anyone else. Feeling lonely does not mean that we have deficient social skills.
John T. Cacioppo
Real relief from loneliness requires the cooperation of at least one other person, and yet the more chronic our loneliness becomes, the less equipped we may be to entice such cooperation.
John T. Cacioppo
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
J.M. Coetzee
If I can teach myself the art of loneliness, then perhaps the art of writing will come more easily to me.
Nell Stevens