Quotes by Professors - Page 15

As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.
Scott Donaldson
Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.
Toni Morrison
What excited and challenged her shipmates horrified the churched women and each set believed the other deeply, dangerously flawed. Although they had nothing in common with the views of each other, they had everything in common with one thing: the promise and threat of men.Here, they agreed, was where security and risk lay. And both had come to terms.
Toni Morrison
I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don’t want to do that. And why? I think something tells us that we should struggle. We don’t really know why we should struggle, but we do, because we think it’s better than sitting down and waiting for calamity.
Chinua Achebe
As far as I'm concerned, Americans don't drink nearly enough. A good alcoholic poisoning of the brain now and then clears it out in a way that nothing else can.
Stuart Rojstaczer
Every instant of every day we are bombarded by information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.
Tim Wu
...I might mention my belief that girls who like Woody Allen movies are nicer girls than girls who don't...
Adam Levin
The thing about girls? Suzanne said. Is we are more content-driven.
George Saunders
I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.
Karen Thompson Walker
Waited for my brother and didn't talk to anybody and nobody talked to her, because she'd always been one of those quiet, semi-retarded girls who you couldn't talk to without being dragged into a whirlpool of dumb stories.
Junot Díaz
There was a hint of spring in her sole green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.
Toni Morrison
I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl's eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Poor Oscar. Without even realizing it he'd fallen into one of those Let's Be Friends Vortexes, the bane of nerdboys everywhere. These relationships were love's version of a stay in the stocks, in you go, plenty of misery guaranteed and what you got out of it besides bitterness and heartbreak nobody knows. Perhaps some knowledge of self and women.
Junot Díaz
A true entrepreneur doesn't see an obstacle and thinks how long its going to take to conquer, they look at it and figure out how high they are going to jump and jump over it.
Frederick E. Owen Jr.
She is dead now, so I can say that she laughed like us, played like us and her adult life turned out okay- so I heard. But then when we were all twelve or less, it seemed as though she floated behind a scrim. Markedly pretty, she had eyes full of distance- a smile made more attractive by what it withheld; some knowingness it appeared unwilling to share. In the early forties "cool" was our word to describe her, although, at the time, I thought she was simply sad. Something treasured had been irretrievably lost, and there was nothing to be done about it. Her attitude reminded me of what I saw in the eyes of scary old people sitting in rocking chairs on the porch or leaning forward on a fence looking at us as though in a little while we would know the doom and catastrophe they already knew. "Uh huh", they murmured when we tripped over the door saddle or ruined our clothes. "where is your mind" they asked when we dropped the milk bottle, let the coal fire go out. Seriously asking a serious question, they showed no surprise. They knew we would always fall down, drop things, be ruined, and forget. And it was possible to lose your mind. She too seemed aware of our haplessness, but she did not wear their frown. A mournful sympathy infected her smile.
Toni Morrison
She'd betrayed her country because she'd believed it was the right thing to do. Yet would she have done this, if not for Arin?He knew none of it. Had never asked for it. Kestrel had made her own choices. It was unfair to blame him.But she wanted to.
Marie Rutkoski
Men will always create new arenas for honor if traditional rituals fade.
Joel Dinerstein
Kestrel's eyes slipped shut. She faded in and out of sleep. When Arin spoke again, she wasn't sure whether he expected her to to hear him.'I remember sitting with my mother in a carriage.' There was a long pause. Then Arin's voice came again in that slow, fluid way that showed the singer in him. 'In my memory, I am small and sleepy, and she is doing something strange. Every time the carriage turns into the sun, she raises her hand as if reaching for something. The light lines her fingers with fire. Then the carriage passes through shadows, and her hand falls. Again sunlight beams through the window, and again her hand lifts. It becomes and eclipse.' Kestrel listened, and it was as if the story itself was an eclipse, drawing its darkness over her.'Just before I fell asleep,' he said, 'I realized that she was shading my eyes from the sun.' She heard Arin shift, felt him look at her.'Kestrel.' She imagined how he would sit, lean forward. How he would look in the glow of the carriage lantern. 'Survival isn't wrong. You can sell your honor in small ways, so long as you guard yourself. You can pour a glass of wine like it's meant to be poured, and watch a man drink, and plot your revenge.' Perhaps his head tilted slightly at this. 'You probably plot even in your sleep.' There was a silence as long as a smile.'Plot away, Kestrel. Survive. If I hadn't lived, no one would remember my mother, not like I do.' Kestrel could no longer deny sleep. It pulled her under.'And I would never have met you.
Marie Rutkoski
Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.
Kiese Laymon
Even she hair itself rough and wiry; long black knotty locks springing from she scalp and corkscrewing all the way down she back... The only thing soft about Tan-Tan is she big molasses-brown eyes that could look on you, and your heart would beat time...
Nalo Hopkinson
We are real black characters with real character, not the stars of American racist spectacle. Blackness is not probable cause.
Kiese Laymon
Unfortunately, honesty hasn't always been a part of the job description for the police force, especially when dealing with our people. Today I must appeal to their sense of integrity, because we need the Mobile Police Department. Before we can do our job, they've got to do theirs...
Ravi Howard
Obama will win. We will win. Then we will continue to lose. And the right questions will never be honestly asked or answered, and it's all just too much.
Kiese Laymon
The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.
Roxane Gay
This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?
Kiese Laymon
The new vantage from which Christian theology as a discourse on Christian identity must operate in the modern world, then, is the Christological horizon of Mary-Israel. To be Christian is to enter into this horizon. But where is the horizon concretely displayed, where is it made visible if not in despised dark (and especially dark female) flesh? Is this not the flesh of homo sacer . . .the flesh that is impoverished, "despised and rejected of men," flesh that in shame we "hide our faces from" (cf. Isa. 53:3)? But if this is the case, it follows that the poverty of dark flesh is where one finds the wealthy God. . . In (Christ"s) taking on the form of the slave, the from of despised dark (female) flesh there is the diclsoure (sic) of divinity, a disclosure that undoes the social arrangement of the colonial-racial tyranny (tynannos,), as the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor called it, that is the darker side of modernity
J. Kameron Carter
Never to have to think of yourself as white is a luxory that makes you deeply stupid.
Leonard Michaels
Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of an awful grin on his face. It was a grin that said he knew I'd come around. Sooner or later, I'd fall in line.
Adam McOmber
It happened so quickly. One minute I was plucking the flower, and the next I was in his chariot immersed in darkness. I struggled to wrench myself free from his grasp and run away. I twisted as far as I could, hoping to see mother chasing after me. But ahead of me, behind me, on either side of me, everywhere I looked, all I could see was darkness.
Tamara Agha-Jaffar
You cruel, hard-hearted gods!” I flung the goblet in his direction. Hermes barely had time to dart out of its way before it hit the wall and shattered to small pieces. “You’re all the same! Hsst! Jealous! Vindictive! That’s what you are! You allow yourselves to take pleasure with any mortal you wish. Let a goddess do the same. Let a goddess choose a mortal for her lover, and you set off in a fury of revenge against her as if her actions are an affront to you. And all the while, you male gods allow yourselves all kinds of liberties you deny to us females.
Tamara Agha-Jaffar
However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads.
Robert Hellenga
As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.
Tim Wu
What i literally cannot describe is the hollowness in my lungs when i am out of her presence. It is as if i were dying from the want of her.
Jed Rubenfeld
Think of it as a life experience," I mumbled. "Isn't your dad always saying we need more of that?""I don't think prancing around PJ Jamieson's pool in our underwear is exactly what he had in mind.
Jody Gehrman
Aaron's therapist calls him a wounded bird, but, I ask you, who wouldn't care for a wounded bird? What kind of person sees a bird with a broken wing, cat on the horizon, and walks on by?
David James Poissant
I tried to find something I already knew about life that might help me reach out and touch my brother and get him to look at me and himself.
Norman Maclean
You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I'll see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her." Her head titled again, but up, this time, and it was to keep the sudden wetness from spilling into her carefully colored false eyelashes. "You knew my Elphie!
Gregory Maguire
You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.
Gary Lutz
No one likes to talk about the positive parts of getting older and aging into orphanhood, how with your parents you often bury a lot of things you were never able to confront or fix or let go of.
Jill McCorkle
Hester, meanwhile, says we should live all of life back to front. We should be born old and age younger. Our baptism should be a ritual of our funeral. We should die as infants, content in our mothers' arms, having lost all our learning and all sense of disappointment. If only we could die, she says, not knowing we'd ever grieved.
Timothy Schaffert
As you ripen, you’ll notice that time is the weirdest thing in the world, that these surprises are relentless, and that getting older is not a stroll but an ambush.
Andrew Solomon
He'd grown eager to hand off his things, as if the weight of his possessions kept him tethered to this earth, and by giving them away, he could snip those strings.
Karen Thompson Walker
To continue what one had been doing -- which was Dante's idea of hell -- is, I came to see, and the vision frightened me, easy in one's sixties.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Old age robs you of every last illusion, even the belief in your own goodness.
Jill Ciment
I'm afraid Dr. Mondrick chose an unfortunate publicity device. After all, the theory of human evolution is no longer front page news. Every known detail of the origin of mankind is extremely important to such a specialist as Dr. Mondrick, but it doesn't interest the man in the street - not unless it's dramatized.
Jack Williamson
In Ohio seasons are theatrical. Each one enters like a prima donna, convinced its performance is the reason the world has people in it.
Toni Morrison
The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you don't go to a movie, watch TV, stare at a wall, play tennis with a friend, make amorous advances to the person who comes to your mind when I speak of amorous advances? Can nothing surfeit, saturate you, turn you off? Where's your shame?
John Barth
The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It's no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, let's the texter/former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can't live propless.
Aimee Bender
And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it's better than smoking, that's what I say. It's the new, lung-safe cigarette.
Aimee Bender
Sophia sat in meditation on the riverbank when a student bent down to place two enormous pearls at her feet as a gift.tShe opened her eyes to see the pearls. She picked one up, but dropped it. It rolled down the hill upon which she was sitting and into the river. The student chased after it and looked all afternoon, diving, coming up for air, diving back down.t“Sophia,” he asked. “Could you show me where it went in? I can’t find it.”t“Right there,” she said throwing the other pearl in the river.
David W. Jones
…it was not whim or wildness which made me go, but a sudden clear realization that tho you were the first man of importance to me, you could not be the last. — Gwendolyn MacEwen to Milton Acorn, 1963 (age 21)
Jeanette Lynes
Maybe the things she loved most weren't meant to be permanent. Maybe the fact that they existed was enough.
Julie Schumacher
She had not come to the shopping centre to buy shoes; she had come to buy food, and there was a big difference between shopping for food and shopping for shoes, and that difference concentrated on one word: guilt.
Alexander McCall Smith
It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none.
Alexander McCall Smith
He (Abraham Lincoln) is one of the few men in history, our own history and all history, whose religion was great enough to bridge the gulfs between the sects, to encompass us all.
Dean sperry
Without us, in other words, there can never be hope of a We.
Junot Díaz
But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?
T.C. Boyle
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
Joyce Carol Oates
Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.
Chinua Achebe
The mist after rain, uninterrupted rainfall on rooftops, pitter-patter intellect. The thoughts I leave behind like footsteps.
Chris Campanioni