Quotes by Professors

I never understood why people from the 1980s thought there would be flying cars. It just seemed really dangerous and impractical to me, but they all talked about it, so it must have been a thing. Meanwhile, my dream for the future was that it wouldn't involve mass extinction and large-scale water shortages and cannibalism.
Dan Chaon
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
I give boring people something to discuss over corn.
Aimee Bender
People always did like to talk, didn't they? That's why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.
Gregory Maguire
Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—
Joyce Carol Oates
It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!
Joyce Carol Oates
For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.
Joyce Carol Oates
The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
Joyce Carol Oates
The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.
Joyce Carol Oates
Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad—I could not bear to “outlive” them—for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.
Joyce Carol Oates
Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.
Joyce Carol Oates
It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.
Joyce Carol Oates
How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.
Joyce Carol Oates
Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
Joyce Carol Oates
Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely—perhaps never—furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing.
Joyce Carol Oates
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
Joyce Carol Oates
That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.
Joyce Carol Oates
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
In many ways. . .the completeness of biography, the achievement of its professionalization, is an ironic fiction, since no life can ever be known completely, nor would we want to know every fact about an individual. Similarly, no life is ever lived according to aesthetic proportions. The "plot" of a biography is superficially based on the birth, life and death of the subject; "character," in the vision of the author. Both are as much creations of the biographer, as they are of a novelist. We content ourselves with "authorized fictions.
Ira Bruce Nadel
Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament.
Frances Mayes
guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
Toni Morrison
Understand that when the beast within yousucceeds again in paralyzing into unendingincompletion whatever you again had the temerity totry to makeits triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of itsrectitude. It knows that it aloneknows you.
Frank Bidart
The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable.
Gregory Woods
These characters depend to such a high degree on their own sense of integrity that for them, victory has nothing to do with happiness. It has more to do with a settling within oneself, a movement inward that makes them whole. Their reward is not happiness...what James's characters gain is self-respect.
Azar Nafisi
Philosophically literate anthropomorphism is exactly what one would expect of any worldview which affirms that human beings are made in the image o
Eleanore Stump
She had to lift both hands to illustrate what she meant, but he just let her carry his hand with her, not about to let go. She pushed the free hand toward the one he held, apparently trying to gesture closeness. "Warm," she said again. And then she did something that undid him to the last faint whisper of his soul: she gave his hand a squeeze with fingertips that could just barely reach around his, apparently using him to indicate what she wanted to say. He meant warmth. He meant this word she couldn't find.
Laura Florand
All the buildings lining rue de Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek.
Eloisa James
You might have liked the United States more,”” she said. “They’ve got more stuff. And if your spaceship is broken, they can probably fix it better.
Nnedi Okorafor
Unlike Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, the United States was created by an enlightened band of Founding Fathers with a global vision for the new republic.
Patrick Mendis
China is constantly reinventing itself and so is the United States.
Patrick Mendis
He said slowly, “You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.
John Williams
Cure for an obsession: get another one.
Mason Cooley
Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.
Timothy Schaffert
The trouble with entering the upper echelon is you have to work harder to stay there.
John Jay Osborn Jr.
Two words from him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I’ll play anything for you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do anything for you, just say the word...
André Aciman
I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn't necessarily have admitted it - except Reza - but you can't tell me they didn't love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you've never had this experience-but who has not been visited by love, laughing?-then you can't understand. And if you have, you don't need me to say another word.
Claire Messud
Shakespeare might have said, we are "consumed with that with which we are nourished by.
Sherry Turkle
We should bear in mind the supercrip stereotype as a figure obsessively, indeed maniacally, over-compensating for a perceived physical difference or lack, since, as we shall see, this aspect ties in quite neatly with the genre specificities and narratival concerns of so much Silver Age superhero literature.
José Alaniz
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.
John Gardner
This was in the good old days, when monsters were fantasy.
Hollis Seamon
People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.Now it made sense – why monsters came out at night.
Joshua Gaylord
One of my roommates, Rafael, he's an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
She stopped then and turned her face toward him and the hateful wind.
Toni Morrison
Why not simply surrender to one’s doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?
Paul Russell
This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.
Donald Barthelme
Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso.
Peter Orner
This is what I’ve always loved about a city, all the worlds hidden away inside, largest of aquariums.
David Vann
And when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition; the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.
Toni Morrison
A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Hugh MacLennan
Words and sentences are subjects of revision paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision.
Barrett Wendell
I am what libraries and librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets.
B. K. Sandwell
If you are doing your best you will not have time to worry about failure.
Robert Hillyer
Communication is a continual balancing act juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world we have to act in concert with others but to survive as ourselves rather than simply as cogs in a wheel we have to act alone.
Deborah Tannen
Passion is never enough neither is skill.
Toni Morrison
The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
Norman Cousins