Quotes by Professors - Page 40

The advice he reads in Ann Landers – good advice as long as you don’t need it, perfectly sensible as long as you don’t have any use for it.
Robert Hellenga
The best way in the world for breaking up a writer's block is to write a lot.
John Gardner
Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.
John Gardner
My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.
John Gardner
You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.
Aimee Bender
Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.
Aimee Bender
It was a voice that you felt you had to listen to—or you ignored at your peril.
Alexander McCall Smith
When people ask for advice they very rarely want your advice and will go ahead and do what they want to do anyway, no matter what you say. That applied in every sort of case; it was a human truth of universal application, but one which most people knew little or nothing about.
Alexander McCall Smith
Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.            *I abjure advice-giver.
Frank Bidart
What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It is the thinnest lines that define us.
David Macinnis Gill
What I'm primarily saying,' he says, 'is that this is a time for knowledge assimilation, not backstabbing. We learned a lesson, you and I. We personally grew. Gratitude for this growth is an appropriate response. Gratitude, and being careful never to make the same mistake twice.
George Saunders
It is in our nature to enjoy atrocity so long as it continues to shock and remains comfortably removed from our own lives.
Paula Marantz Cohen
I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind? My job is to keep everyone guessing.
Gary Shteyngart
Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Life is more than we get and possess. It is a mystery!
Dr. Vivencio Ballano
When you get right down to it, we don’t ever want to know one another too well. We want there to be that mystery. Where there’s mystery, there’s hope.
Paul Russell
To speak a language that was as intimate and free as certain dreams, saying darkly, thrillingly, My cock inside of you. Your come in my mouth ... He focused on the boy’s slim, tight hips; with the tip of his tongue he tasted an asshole’s bitter, forbidden mystery.
Paul Russell
In the temple, I sit on the cool floor next to Grandfather, beneath the stern benevolence of the goddess's glance. Grandfather is clad in only a traditional silk dhoti--no fancy modern clothes for him. That's one of the things I admire about him, how he is always unapologetically, uncompromisingly himself. His spine is erect and impatient; white hairs blaze across his chest.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
In the white marble hall of the hotel, I'm waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we're dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
God puzzled her and she was too ashamed of Him to say so.
Toni Morrison
I hadn't even solved the mystery of my own body.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.
Norman Maclean
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.
Neil Armstrong
to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing
David Lodge
Have you ever considered what Adam and Eve were doing when they got into so much trouble? As I read the story, they were shopping. The forbidden fruit was not scattered throughout the garden, not in many places, not in multiple locations, but one place, one site, one location and one location only. Perhaps they just came upon it, “Oh, look, the forbidden fruit…” or, perhaps, they were looking for something, searching, shopping. Somewhere in their dissatisfaction they thought, “If only we had something more…
David W. Jones
To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he'd step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I'd been rehearsing for days now, Please, don't hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.
André Aciman
I didn't grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often did.
Susan Choi
She led him to the top of the stairs, where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls. There were two rooms and she took him into one of them, hoping he wouldn’t mind the fact that she was not prepared; that though she could remember desire, she had forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in the hands; how blindness was altered so that what leapt to the eye were places to lie down, and all else—doorknobs, straps, hooks, the sadness that crouched in corners, and the passing of time—was interference.
Toni Morrison
There is no more destructive force in human affairs -- not greed, not hatred -- than the desire to have been right. Non-attachment to possessions is trivial when compared with non-attachment to opinions.
Mark A.R. Kleiman
A pure love is a selfless love, but can desire ever be selfless?
John Dufresne
Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognised here: appetite. I recognised it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamiliar. It had forced me to rule out everything else. And there was a second reason for my recognition, which because unprecedented was not recognition at all, but astounding discovery: Martha's face told me. I saw appetite there...
Susan Choi
I want to be loved so badly, it verges on mild insanity.
Gary Shteyngart
In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.
Gary Shteyngart
The thing about music was that you never knew the shape of anyone’s desire.
Richard Powers
I’m talking about other kinds of hunger. Desire.
Paul Russell
All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.
Paul Russell
When man is finally able to see himself and the world around him with clear cognition, he finds a picture far more pleasant. Visible in unmistakable clarity and devastating detail is man’s failure to be what he might be and his misuse of his world. This revelation causes him to leap out in search of a way of life and system of values which will enable him to be more than he has been. He seeks a foundation of self-respect, which will have value system rooted in knowledge and cosmic reality where he expresses himself so that all others, all beings can continue to exist. His values now are of a different order from those at previous levels: They arise not from selfish interest but from the recognition of the magnificence of existence and the desire that it shall continue to be.
Clare W. Graves
The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
There are so many ways of classifying our tendencies, but I think one of the most telling must be this: there are those of us who do not wrestle very often or for very long with our appetites, who can simply say, Enough, and walk away, and those of us who are constantly at odds with how much we desire and what we actually allow ourselves. The gay between desire and restraint: here rages the river of discontent, one that often threatens to overflow its banks.
Christine Sneed
She was everything he'd ever wanted in a woman, and nothing he'd ever thought to find in a lady.
Eloisa James
And Chris remembers: what they used to talk about was desire. Impossible, longing dreams. Delirious, aching confusion. That was the vital element they lived off … because it was the one thing that mattered. Not things, or achievements, or politics, or fracking or anything else: just sweet naked blameless unending desire.
Paul Russell
I could stand before him, be in his arms as I was just then, and still be lost to him, some phantom of a desire he cherished more than he cherished me, the woman he claimed to love.
Alexander Chee
There can be no god without desire.
David Vann
And yet, about two weeks after his arrival, all I wanted every night was for him to leave his room, not via its front door, but through the French windows on our balcony. I wanted to hear his window open, hear his espadrilles on the balcony, and then the sound of my own window, which was never locked, being pushed open as he’d step into my room after everyone had gone to bed, slip under my covers, undress me without asking, and after making me want him more than I thought I could ever want another living soul, gently, softly, and, with the kindness one Jew extends to another, work his way into my body, gently and softly, after heeding the words I’d been rehearsing for days now, Please, don’t hurt me, which meant, Hurt me all you want.
André Aciman
Was our intimacy paid for in the wrong currency? Or is intimacy the desired product no matter where you find it, how you acquire it, what you pay for it, black market, grey market, taxed, untaxed, under the table, over the counter.
André Aciman
Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.
Aimee Bender
Sometimes…tSometimes doubt is the opposite of faith, but sometimes doubt can be a pathway to faith.tSometimes weakness is the opposite of strength, but sometimes weakness can be the pathway to strength.tSometimes addiction is the opposite of sobriety, but sometimes addiction can be the pathway to sobriety.tSometimes infidelity is the opposite of fidelity, but sometimes infidelity can be a pathway to fidelity.tSometimes failure is the opposite of success, but sometimes failure can be the pathway to success.
David W. Jones
Every time we cheer the downfall of a powerful woman, we're giving ourselves the message that power is bad and we shouldn't desire it. Every time we revel in a beautiful woman's aging or weight gain, we reinforce the idea that we, too, are less valuable if we are old or overweight. Every time we gloat over a woman's loss of a husband to a younger, prettier rival, we are reminding ourselves that our own relationship is unstable, that someday our man, too, will move on to greener pastures.
Susan Shapiro Barash
Risky is not the same as crazy. Failing is not the same as being worthless.
Alyson Hagy
Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failutre that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that... He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine." And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else? What did you expect? he asked himself.
John Williams
It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student.
Paul Russell
I wander cowboy sidewalks of wood, wearing a too-small hat, filled with remorse for the many lives I failed to lead.
George Saunders
One thinks of the failure of representation since 9/11, the proliferation of novels, the media glut, the surfeit of images that somehow slide too easily into a banal repertoire, commodified shock.
Maureen N. McLane
Success is not always equal to profit, Failure is not always equal to loss.
Dr. Mohd Nayyer Rahman
The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls.
Randy Pausch
People have been driving off of the canyon for decades. I don't know of any that were accidental. One Ranger who worked here before I did told me that on several occasions, when cars drove off and folks died, they went down and collected the remains. But there were no helicopters strong enough and affordable enough to haul the cars out. He told me Rangers went down later and sprayed the cars with paint to help them blend in with the rocks.
Nancy Eileen Muleady-Mecham
We human beings glimpse lofty ideals, catch ourselves betraying them, and sink to suicidal despair--despair from which only the love of our friends can save us, since friends see in us those nobler qualities we ourselves, out of long familiarity, have forgotten we possess. That, of course, is why the suicidal person is difficult around his friends.
John Gardner
You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes.
Martin Amis