Quotes by Professors - Page 17

I'm a citizen of the republic of empathy.
Sam Lipsyte
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
Leslie Jamison
Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.
Leslie Jamison
This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.
Leslie Jamison
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.
Leslie Jamison
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
Leslie Jamison
We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren't entirely aware we had.
Leslie Jamison
I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.
Leslie Jamison
[A] great novel will allow you to transcend the social, racial and political limitations imposed by the vicissitudes of life and to find a deep fraternity based on empathy.
Azar Nafisi
My mother always tells me that anyone who gets enjoyment from other people's misery will eventually get the greatest discomfort from his or her own miseries.
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.
Leslie Jamison
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesn't say.
Leslie Jamison
I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.
Leslie Jamison
It is not accidental that the most unsympathetic characters in Austen's novels are those who are incapable of genuine dialogue with others. They rant. They lecture. They scold. This incapacity for true dialogue implies an incapacity for tolerance, self-reflection and empathy.
Azar Nafisi
History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.
Julius Lester
Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.
Leslie Jamison
Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.
Leslie Jamison
I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called “culture” – and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. ~ Through the local or regional, through our individual voices, we work to create art that will speak to others who know nothing of us. In our very obliqueness to one another, an unexpected intimacy is born.
Joyce Carol Oates
The writer,' said Donald Barthelme, 'is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.' In this mode of not-knowing, the thick-torsoed, literal, and crew-cut mind is moved to the sidelines in favor of the swinging, perceptive, light-footed, tutu-wearing subconscious.
George Saunders
So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes – well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you – brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.
George Saunders
Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.
Peter Selgin
It’s very hard — weirdly hard — to clear your mind of all that crap so that you can just sit down and write and find that place where you’re just involved and enjoying the imaginary place you’ve discovered. All the other “problems” with writing are just puzzles, and they can be interesting to try to crack, even when it’s frustrating.
Dan Chaon
There are students that are scattered, who need to see something through to the finish, but I would say there are possibly more who do not entertain the leaps of the mind that need to be nurtured, and this desire to finish becomes more about being a good student than about finishing something interesting. Where does work ethic fit in with writing? I think that's pretty complicated from one writer to the next. You need some kind of work ethic, but what does it look like for you?
Aimee Bender
Never use the passive voice. Do not say, 'It will get done.' Say, 'I'll do it,' and then stick to a solid, unwavering deadline
Gina Barreca
I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own? I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]
Amos Oz
To air one's views gratuitously, however, is to imply that the demand for them is brisk, which may not be the case, and which, in any event, may not be relevant to the discussion.
Strunk Jr.
Although unanswered prayer is indeed a theme of the book, it is not the heart of the book, for unanswered prayer describes a problem but offers no solutions.
Gerald L. Sittser
the book is intended to show how it is possible to live in and be enlarged by loss, even as we continue to experience it.
Gerald L. Sittser
I had no way of anticipating the adjustments I would have to make and the suffering I would have to endure in the months and years ahead.
Gerald L. Sittser
Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is no longer the key to success. Openness is.
Jeff Jarvis
Where some see a new world disorder, others see the opportunity to bring organization.
Jeff Jarvis
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
Thomas C. Foster
Every novel is brand-new. It’s never been written before in the history of the world. At the same time, it’s merely the latest in a long line of narratives—not just novels, but narratives generally—since humans began telling stories to themselves and each other.
Thomas C. Foster
The central theme of the book is that prayer is best understood as a long, sometimes perilous, epic journey that eventually leads to triumph.
Gerald L. Sittser
This practically unlimited supply of advertisers in a fluid marketplace appears to be a new economic model that may insulate Google from some of the dynamics of an economy built on mass and scarcity. Google has its own economy.
Jeff Jarvis
We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas.
Jeff Jarvis
prayer is the one discipline in the Christian faith that makes us feel entirely dependent on God and thus sets us up for profound disappointment when God doesn’t respond to our needs and requests.
Gerald L. Sittser
Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
we are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The good that may come out of the loss does not erase its badness or excuse the wrong done. Nothing can do that.
Gerald L. Sittser
My prayer as you read this book is that you will find comfort for the disappointment of unanswered prayer, but also courage to continue on the epic journey that prayer is.
Gerald L. Sittser
It is how we respond to loss that matters. That response will largely determine the quality, the direction, and the impact of our lives.
Gerald L. Sittser
Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Never make a decision until you have to.
Randy Pausch
Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.
Randy Pausch
A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.
J. Budziszewski
There is no moment that exceeds in beauty that moment when one looks at a woman and finds that she is looking at you in the same way that you are looking at her. The moment in which she bestows that look that says, "Proceed with your evil plan, sumbitch." The initial smash on glance. The, the drawing near. This takes a long time, it seems like months, although only minutes pass, in fact. Languor is the word that describes this part of the process. Your persona floats toward her persona, over the Sea of Hesitation. Many weeks pass before they meet, but the weeks are days, or seconds. Still, everything is decided. You have slept together in the glance.
Donald Barthelme
In a way, her strangeness, her naivete, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art from, she became dangerous.
Toni Morrison
For Tolstoy . . . anything that human beings do has its glory. . . . I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.
Mark Van Doren
Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. Youth is the time for exploration, maturation, socialization.
Jeff Jarvis
In the real world, the tests are all open book.
Jeff Jarvis
His work was defined by emphasis on the subversiveness philosophy, which asks questions, as opposed to the self-satisfaction of politics, which believes it has answers and insists on them.
Harvey Mansfield
Curiosity lies in a hidden corner of the scientific mind.
Eraldo Banovac
Intellectual curiosity and the human brain are the root of science.
Eraldo Banovac
Swaddle in our favorites, we missed out on what was in our peripheral vision.
Sherry Turkle
The idea of the original had no place.
Sherry Turkle
Revenge is sweet but not nourishing.
Mason Cooley
If you seek revenge, it means you're scared or you feel guilty for what happened in some way. It's okay to be angry with someone, but don't think about revenge. It's like a disease that eats you up.
David Miller
Six months ago when she first came up with the idea to kill Wilson, back when she was living in Memphis, she'd started going to church again. Since she was spending so much time thinking about sinister things, the least she could do, she reasoned, was to think about God and his love twice a week at church so that she wouldn't become a total sociopath. And rather than kill other people who were stand-ins for the person she really wanted to kill, like serial killers did, she'd be kind and generous to others and hone in on the one who deserved to die. And her plan had worked extremely well. Since she'd started planning to kill Wilson, and then decided to destroy his family instead, she felt no animosity toward anyone but him. Almost none at all!
Elizabeth Stuckey-French