Quotes by Professors - Page 36

Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in grammar.
Richard Mitchell
A conclusion is simply the place where you got tired of thinking.
Dan Chaon
The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Waiting, he thought, was the most miserable condition a man could find himself in. His whole life, he had been waiting for one thing or another.
Paul Russell
Sometimes a man must throw caution to the wind.
Nnedi Okorafor
Trying to understand man without recognizing him as imago Dei is like trying to understand a bas-relief without recognizing it as a carving.
J. Budziszewski
I could settle for being a man, or I could struggle to become a human being.
Robert Jensen
I thought of what my mom had said. "You talk like a man." It was easier to talk like a man than to be one.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Nothing represents a man better than his ideas.
Eraldo Banovac
The devil is a very big angel, but a very little man.
Gregory Maguire
He knew that he’d known her for less than a week, but now that she was gone he was continually probing his feelings for her, the way he might probe a sore tooth with his tongue, engaging her in imaginary conversations, imagining her saying such delightful things.
Robert Hellenga
We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.
Leslie Jamison
Mr. Ferris didn't say anything the whole time. He sat next to me and listened. And when I finished, I looked at him.He was crying. I'm not lying. He was crying.I don't think it was because how hard I hit him.I know how the Black-Backed Gull feels when he looks up into the sky.Maybe, somehow, Mr. Ferris does too.
Gary D. Schmidt
It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened.
Aimee Bender
I wanted to tell him not to cry anymore, tell him that what those boys did to that bird didn’t matter. But I knew it did matter. It mattered to Dante. And, anyway, it didn’t do any good to tell him not to cry because he needed to cry. That’s the way he was.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Yet he understood that there are some things you feel and others that you choose to feel, and that the choice doesn't make the feeling less valid.
Marie Rutkoski
My fiancé immediately began to look uncomfortable, but did not voice this discomfort except by a soft gurgling sound in the throat . . . The gurgling escalated, but my mother politely switched on the dishwasher, and soon we heard mostly the sound of machinery rather than that of a person's feelings surfacing.
Alexandra Kleeman
I find it increasingly difficult to speak of my feelings at will.
Alexandra Kleeman
Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.
Leslie Jamison
See, this is the way I see it. Not all anger is the same. Because there are different kids of anger. And you know what else - sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as you're not making someone bleed.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It was always a mistake, she thought, to dwell on the cause of one's anger.
Alexander McCall Smith
But can I say, now that she is dead, long dead that I only half believed in her. I wanted, I needed her to revolt. I know, revolutions take vast energy like volcanic eruptions. I know. And the sick must husband their resources even as they are resourceful for their husbands. But I couldn't help wanting for her, couldn't help the feeling that she'd given in, that she had measured out with coffee spoons what it was that she might ask of life and having found it lacking, tragically, gapingly lacking, had decided none-the-less to accept her modest share. I wanted her ignoble, irresponsible, unreasonable, petty, grasping, fucking greedy for the lot of it, jostling and spitting and clawing for every grain of life.
Claire Messud
Anger, hate, blind temper, that crazy switch to destroy, all of it purified into discipline and control, the best side of boxing, Billy says.
Adam Berlin
Patience is an ever present alternative to the mind's endemic restlessness and impatience. Scratch the surface of impatience and what you will find lying beneath it, subtly or not so subtly, is anger. It's the strong energy of not wanting things to be the way they are and blaming someone (often yourself) or something for it. This doesn't mean you can't hurry when you have to. It is possible even to hurry patiently, mindfully, moving fast because you have chosen to.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
A gust of wind doesn't suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn't chime. The phone doesn't ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.
Larry Watson
His face became a mirror, and in it I saw a monster version of myself, unleashing my anger like black magic. In front of my children, in front of my neighbors' house. If I'd really been a witch Nathan would have been a column of dust. Not even a lizard, not even a toad. Just nothing. Nothingness,
Leah Stewart
I couldn't exactly storm away in anger. I'd just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I went on and on, and as I continued, I became more righteous in my indignation. It was the sort of anger one gets high on, the kind one takes home to show off to family and friends.
Azar Nafisi
For a moment, Milly couldn't breathe as her anger flew out of her chest and into her mouth. She ran her tongue over it, hard and bitter, then swallowed it again.
Roxane Gay
Waiting in the reception area, she had flicked through a news magazine that had been lying on the table for clients to read while waiting for their appointment. On the cover there had been a picture of a well-known politician, a man famous for his rudeness and aggression. She had looked at the eyes--the piercing, accusing eyes, and had seen only an impenetrable, defensive anger. Nothing--no forced smiles nor rehearsed protestation of concern, could cancel out the cold selfishness of those eyes.
Alexander McCall Smith
I bit into the chocolate chip. Slowed myself down.By then, almost a week in, I could sort through the assault of layers a little more quickly. The chocolate chips were from a factory, so they had that same slight metallic, absent taste to them, and the butter had been pulled from cows in pens, so the richness was not as full. The eggs were tinged with a hint of far away and plastic. All of those parts hummed in the distance, and then the baker, who'd mixed the batter and formed the dough, was angry. A tight anger, in the cookie itself.
Aimee Bender
It was one of the only times in my teaching career that I got angry and showed it in class. I was young and inexperienced, and I thought certain standards were respected and understood.
Azar Nafisi
Abba Marcius said, 'If you rebuke someone and do it with anger, you have allowed a passion to control you. You have not saved anyone and have destroyed yourself'.
Tim Vivian
Abba Macarius said, 'If you rebuke someone and do it with anger, you have allowed a passion to control you. You have not saved anyone and have destroyed yourself'.
Tim Vivian
Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on - or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense
Gregory Maguire
What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can’t be mass marketed.
Claire Vaye Watkins
In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.
Kevin Haworth
When something really bad is going on in a culture, the average guy doesn’t see it. He can’t. He’s average. And is surrounded by and immersed in the cant and discourse of the status quo.
George Saunders
The highways of American cities are an enduring testimony to our acceptance of ugliness
J. Rufus Fears
Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.
Junot Díaz
Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet.
Noel Ignatiev
It's because there are too many people who want to stop us having fun. That's the reason.
Alexander McCall Smith
We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.
Alexander McCall Smith
We the people have more power than we know, and we must learn to use it judiciously.
Jeff Jarvis
This is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. Like all psychological symptoms, it obscures a problem by "solving" it without addressing it.
Sherry Turkle
Addiction is to the habits of mind that technology allows us to practice.
Sherry Turkle
As adults, we can develop and change our opinions. In childhood, we establish the truth of our hearts.
Sherry Turkle
She had set it on the Internet, its own peculiar echo chamber.
Sherry Turkle
Litterature provides us with the opportunity to escape into fictional worlds that are ultimately rooted in human universals shaped by common biological forces.
Gad Saad
if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.
Junot Díaz
Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Culture primarily witnesses the absence of meaning, not it's presence.
Thomas McFarland
The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.
Eric Hobsbawm
Once a culture becomes entirely advertising friendly, it seizes to be a culture at all.
Mark Crispin Miller
Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
He wanted to break me, the me I'd made, the me I'd needed to make, my need, mine, my whole life since I could remember. I didn't want to hear him that night. When I was ready to change I'd change. When life opens up before you, when you don't really know death ... it's easy to promise yourself change. Keeping the lines hard, the parts of me separate, was what I knew, how I lived.
Adam Berlin
Perhaps they didn't know they were at sea. Was there a certain percentage of people at sea who lacked the knowledge that they were at sea?
Ben Marcus
Once again I am only who I am.
George Saunders
The world each person creates for himself is a distinctive world, not the same world others occupy.
Dean C. Barnlund
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure--as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been. Dim presences gathered at the edge of his consciousness; he could not see them, but he knew that they were there, gathering their forces toward a kind of palpability he could not see or hear. He was approaching them, he knew; but there was no need to hurry. He could ignore them if he wished; he had all the time there was.There was a softness around him, and a languor crept upon his limbs. A sense of his own identity came upon him with a sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
John Williams