Quotes by Professors - Page 18

But suspense presupposes uncertainty. No matter how nightmarish the situation, real suspense is impossible when we know in advance that the protagonist will prevail (as we would if Woolrich had used series characters) or will be destroyed. This is why, despite his congenital pessimism, Woolrich manages any number of times to squeeze out an upbeat resolution. Precisely because we can never know whether a particular novel or story will be light or dark, allegre or noir, his work remains hauntingly suspenseful.("Introduction")
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
Real suspense comes with moral dilemma and the courage to make and act upon choices. False suspense comes from the accidental and meaningless occurrence of one damned thing after another.
John Gardner
It feels as though it were just yesterday Grandfather exited my life like a bullet, leaving a bleeding hole behind.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get the Bose family to their destination on time. This disappoints Asif only a little. In his six years of chauffeuring the rich and callous, he has realized that, to them, servants are invisible.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I've found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.
Margaret Lazarus Dean
Danger will come upon us when it will. We can't stop it. We can only try to be prepared. There's no point in looking ahead to that danger and suffering its effects even before it comes to us.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
She wants another spin on the wheel of fortune? This was always my problem with her: I could never tell the difference between the feeling of love and the feeling of danger.
Scott Hutchins
We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death?
Elie Wiesel
It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.
Adam Levin
Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.
Jorie Graham
The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences. The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes. To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars.
Kristen Iversen
It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
Leslie Jamison
I also don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.
Roxanne Gay
I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Remember, you're not half of anything, you're twice of everything.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
We can all participate in the heritage of man. We all can help to preserve it. And we can all make our own modest contribution to it.We must not as for more.
Karl R. Popper
If you took one-tenth the energy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out... Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won't make us happier.
Randy Pausch
When he got a story urge, there was nothing to do but grab a pen and write. Otherwise it was too much like getting a hard-on and not jerking off.
Paul Russell
If you don’t wake up at three in the morning and want to do something, you’re wasting your time.
Harold Eugene Edgerton
Individuals are told to reduce our "carbon footprint," and we should. But how many years of riding a bike to work would it take me to offset one F-15 flying for an hour?
Bruce E. Johansen
...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.
Claire Vaye Watkins
I hold the biscuits in front of his face and he stands up."What do I have to do?" he says."Nothing," I say. "They're for you.""Are they poisoned?" he says."No," I say."Eat one," he says.So I do."Probably the others are poisoned," he says. "Eat a fraction of each."I eat a corner off each biscuit. He looks at the reminders suspiciously, then sniffs them."I'm not sure it's worth it," he says. "How I wish you'd never come. Perhaps you've left the poison off of just those corners."I begin to realize I'll doubt whatever information he gives me."Lick the entire biscuit," he says. "Then give them to me."So I lick each biscuit."Both sides," he says.I lick both sides of each biscuit. I give him the wet biscuits and he cracks them open and sniffs them. Then he puts them in his pocket. "What do you want?" he says. "Now that you've failed to poison me to death.
George Saunders
Those mortals who operate in the grey area between conviction and incredulity are in a position to choose most meaningfully, and with most meaningful consequences […] Perhaps only a doubter can appreciate the miracle of life without end.
Terryl L. Givens
And now none of it could be undone. That was the exquisite irony: the act that had undone everything could not itself be undone.
Paul Russell
Be extremely careful when using irony: bear in mind that irony might be an overture for sarcasm
Eraldo Banovac
Be extremely careful when using irony: bear in mind that irony might bean overture for sarcasm.
Eraldo Banovac
The universe loves irony even more than it loves futility.
Paul Russell
Mercy, how we do so often love to immortalize those despised and forgotten in life.
Timothy Beal
The old Televisions had an off switch.
Chris Bachelder
Understand yourself, accept yourself, but do not be yourself.
Luke Rhinehart
Perhaps we can conceive of the ironist as the fetishist's apprentice, reaching out for all readers, ensnaring them in a tangle of ambiguity, uncertainty and indecision from which there is no escape. Irony, quite possibly, makes fetishists of us all.
Janet Beizer
If we chose to refuse irony, we risk becoming irony's dupe.
Janet Beizer
i've heard this called st. peter's square," arlene said. "but it isn't square. it's oval.
David Morrell
I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.
Ron Carlson
A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.
Martin Amis
Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time.
David Morrell
So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.
David Morrell
I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I was also exhausted by the effort. I clearly wasn't in shape. You don't just tie on a pair of running shoes and go out and run a marathon. You have to be in running shape, just like you have to be in writing shape.
Julie Tetel Andresen
...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
John Gardner
PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
Alexander Chee
I still love the sound of breaking,the tearing of the page
Dean Young
Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft
Maxine Hong Kingston
I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing.I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.
Chris Campanioni
But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.
Katharine Weber
I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I’m not with them I don’t have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.
Joyce Carol Oates
A library is never -- for lovers of the written word -- simply a place for conserving or storing books but rather a sort of living creature with a personality and even moods which we should understand and learn to live with.
Francisco Márquez Villanueva
There were some people, it seemed, who were incapable of being pleasant about anything. Of course, the cars that such people drove tended to be difficult as well. Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person's gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.
Alexander McCall Smith
...it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.
Alexander McCall Smith
A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.
Leah Stewart
The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Of course, the abolition of Hell meant that such thoughts were now the merest fantasy. Isobel was agnostic as to what, if anything, lay in store for us after this life; that there was a world of spirit seemed to her to be a possibility that we should not exclude. Consciousness was an elusive entity about which we knew very little, other than that it came into existence when certain conditions were present- a sufficient mass of brain cells operating in a particular way. But could we really say much more than that about where it was located & whether it could survive in other conditions? The fact that a plant grew in one place did not mean that it could not grow in another. And if something lay behind this consciousness, orchestrated it & and the conditions that produced it, then why should we not call this something God?
Alexander McCall Smith
Very..." She left the word hanging. Very unfinished, thought Isabel. The woman finished her sentence. "Very beautiful." Oh, really! thought Isabel. The verdict from others was much the same. Oh well, thought Isabel. Perhaps I'm not sufficiently used to the language he's using. Music is not an international language, she thought, no matter how frequently that claim is made; some words of the language may be the same, but not all, and one needs to know the rules to understand what is being said. Perhaps I just don't understand the conventions by which Nick Smart is communicating with his audience.
Alexander McCall Smith
I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by - that one guy. David Frost. 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-' You know this poem, right? 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-""I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can't travel both? That seemed really unfair to me.
Dan Chaon
She's elegant," Olivia stated. "I would kill to have her figure.""Really?""Of course. I have always wished to look precisely like her. Though obviously, not enough to avoid food," she added."That's madness. You have everything she doesn't."Olivia opened her mouth, ready to argue. "Everything she hasn't."She frowned at him."Including me.
Eloisa James
I'm fat," she blurted out. "You are not fat. You're the most beautiful, voluptuous woman I know." His eyes moved down her body, deliberately, slowly, then back up to her face. What she saw in them sent fire squirming through her stomach and lower."I want every inch of you," he said, growling it. "I want to fall on my knees and worship at your hips." He reach out, shaped her curves from breast to hips with a burning sweep of his hand that a man was allowed to give only his wife.
Eloisa James
Quin reached out, spun her back to him, and pulled her into his arms, held her tight, so tight that she could hardly breathe. "I need you," he said, low and fierce, into her hair. "Oh, G-d, Olivia, how did I ever live without you?"She reached up, pulled his face down to hers. "I'm yours, for good or ill."There was a little click as the door to the ballroom closed, but Olivia paid no mind. "You're the missing piece of me," Quin said. "You make me feel.
Eloisa James
You are absolutely beautiful," Anne said. "But if you see yourself, you'll want to pin your hair back like a shepherdess in a bad play."(Eleanor) "Are you saying that I normally look as if I'm tending sheep? With straw in my hair? As if I might yodel?
Eloisa James
I been running up a bill with the devil ever since, and now he's come to collect on the debt.
Steven B. Weissman