Quotes by Professors - Page 41

Even the suicide desires his own good: he wrongly imagines that he would be better off dead. The moral problem is not that we love ourselves but that we love ourselves the wrong way.
J. Budziszewski
Rebuffed from his fine feelings, Milkman matched her cold tone. "You loved those white folks that much?""Love?" she asked. "Love?""Well, what are you taking care of their dogs for?""Do you know why she killed herself? She couldn't stand to see the place go to ruin. She couldn't live without servants and money and what it could buy. Every cent was gone and the taxes took whatever came in. She had to let the upstairs maids go, then the cook, then the dog trainer, then the yardman, then the chauffeur, then the car, then the woman who washed once a week. Then she started selling bits and pieces––land, jewels, furniture. The last few years we ate out of the garden. Finally she couldn't take it anymore. The thought of having no help, no money––well, she couldn't take that. She had to let everything go.""But she didn't let you go." Milkman had no trouble letting his words snarl."No, she didn't let me go. She killed herself.""And you still l
Toni Morrison
Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.
Martin Amis
As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.
Cathy Caruth
It used to be said, not so long ago, that every suicide gave Satan special pleasure. I don't think that's true—unless it isn't true either that the Devil is a gentleman. If the Devil has no class at all, then okay, I agree: He gets a bang out of suicide. Because suicide is a mess. As a subject for study, suicide is perhaps uniquely incoherent. And the act itself is without shape and without form. The human project implodes, contorts inward—shameful, infantile, writhing, gesturing. It's a mess in there.
Martin Amis
He can't value you more than you value yourself.
Toni Morrison
Bend over backward, do a favor, and give and build confidence in people. It's a time to compliment, support and acknowledge the good things people do.
Erwin K. Thomas
Suffering shapes the life force, sometimes into anger, sometimes into blame and self-pity. Eventually it may show us the wisdom of embracing and loving life.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Josh joined her at the window. She let him look. He should know that the world was not all lessons and iguanas and Nintendo. It was also this muddy simple boy tethered like an animal.
George Saunders
As an inmate of a concentration camp, Corrie Ten Boom heard a commotion, and saw a short distance away a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. “What can we do for these people?” Corrie whispered. “Show them that love is greater,” Betsie replied. In that moment, Corrie realized her sister’s focus was on the prison guard, not the victim she was watching. Betsie saw the world through a different lens. She considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.
Terryl L. Givens
Why the Romans, Father?" I asked him one afternoon. "Because, my child, they teach us how to bear suffering in a world of injustice where all faith is dead," he answered.
Judith Merkle Riley
Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering
Andrew Solomon
Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it...
M. Scott Momaday
All to often, suffering exists in a realm beyond vocabulary so we navigate that realm awkwardly, fumbling for the right words, hoping we can somehow approximate an understanding of matters that should never have to be understood by anyone in any place in the world.
Roxane Gay
She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought.
Alexander McCall Smith
Take the famous slogan on the atheist bus in London … “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” … The word that offends against realism here is “enjoy.” I’m sorry—enjoy your life? Enjoy your life? I’m not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion … Only sometimes, when you’re being lucky, will you stand in a relationship to what’s happening to you where you’ll gaze at it with warm, approving satisfaction. The rest of the time, you’ll be busy feeling hope, boredom, curiosity, anxiety, irritation, fear, joy, bewilderment, hate, tenderness, despair, relief, exhaustion … This really is a bizarre category error.But not necessarily an innocent one … The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren’t being “worried” by us believer … Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What’s so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? … Suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, that you are the fifty-something woman with the Tesco bags, trudging home to find out whether your dementing lover has smeared the walls of the flat with her own shit again. Yesterday when she did it, you hit her, and she mewled till her face was a mess of tears and mucus which you also had to clean up. The only thing that would ease the weight on your heart would be to tell the funniest, sharpest-tongued person you know about it: but that person no longer inhabits the creature who will meet you when you unlock the door. Respite care would help, but nothing will restore your sweetheart, your true love, your darling, your joy. Or suppose you’re that boy in the wheelchair, the one with the spasming corkscrew limbs and the funny-looking head. You’ve never been able to talk, but one of your hands has been enough under your control to tap out messages. Now the electrical storm in your nervous system is spreading there too, and your fingers tap more errors than readable words. Soon your narrow channel to the world will close altogether, and you’ll be left all alone in the hulk of your body. Research into the genetics of your disease may abolish it altogether in later generations, but it won’t rescue you. Or suppose you’re that skanky-looking woman in the doorway, the one with the rat’s nest of dreadlocks. Two days ago you skedaddled from rehab. The first couple of hits were great: your tolerance had gone right down, over two weeks of abstinence and square meals, and the rush of bliss was the way it used to be when you began. But now you’re back in the grind, and the news is trickling through you that you’ve fucked up big time. Always before you’ve had this story you tell yourself about getting clean, but now you see it isn’t true, now you know you haven’t the strength. Social services will be keeping your little boy. And in about half an hour you’ll be giving someone a blowjob for a fiver behind the bus station. Better drugs policy might help, but it won’t ease the need, and the shame over the need, and the need to wipe away the shame.So when the atheist bus comes by, and tells you that there’s probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it’s true, is that anyone who isn’t enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. The three of you are, for instance; you’re all three locked in your unshareable situations, banged up for good in cells no other human being can enter. What the atheist bus says is: there’s no help coming … But let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation, on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation. St Augustine called this kind of thing “cruel optimism” fifteen hundred years ago, and it’s still cruel.
Francis Spufford
The problem with trying to find your happiness through avoidance is the nature of reality. Reality simply does not allow us to evade unwanted experiences. Sure, we might be able to escape a few {...] but the evasive life often comes at a cost, like having to live your life in terror. Even if we can successfully ward off some terrifying experiences, we can not advert them all. Particularly, the most unpleasant ones: sickness, old age and death. If our strategy has been to flea unpleasant circumstances, when they come to meet us - as they surely will - our suffering will be great indeed.
Mark W. Muesse
... that "take" was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.
Adam Johnson
It is our contemporary culture’s tragedy to have lost any sense of suffering as a positive dimension of human existence. Beginning with the premise that life ought to be without pain, we make suffering something to be avoided at all cost. We consider the equation between evil and suffering so self-evident that we make avoiding suffering the equal of fighting evil. No wonder we are the most narcotized generation ever to inhabit the earth, searching for ever more effective addictive patterns to anaesthetize our existence.
Luke Timothy Johnson
Those who are in pain – most of the world’s populations at any given moment – do not do a lot of thinking, speaking, or writing about suffering. All their energy goes into surviving. That is why a lot of what is said and written about suffering seems hollow to those actually in pain.
Luke Timothy Johnson
The only thing suffering teaches us is that we are capable of suffering.
Melvin Jules Bukiet
The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...
Elie Wiesel
Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.
Donald Harington
What to do with the past? There was so much of it.
Robert Hellenga
The past is the past. It’s the present we should worry about.
Paul Russell
To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The "better life" she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one.
Toni Morrison
Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.
Roxane Gay
What I am searching for is the gaps - the silences. This is how I see the past: as an excavation. You sift through the rubble, pick up one fragment here, another there, label it and record where you found it, noting the time and date of discovery. It is not just the foundations I am looking for but something at once more and less tangible.
Azar Nafisi
Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.
Toni Morrison
I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present.
Luke Rhinehart
While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.
John Williams
Most of us assume that human beings have free will. However, . . . [we] are very much conditioned by our species, culture, family, and by the past in general. . . . It is rare for a human being to have free will. . . . (140)
Ravi Ravindra
You your own best thing, Sethe. You are.
Toni Morrison
I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
But I was coming to learn that much of your perception of a relationship is shaped by everything else that happens to be going on in your life at the time. When I first met Ed Farley, I had been starved for love. He was the first man I'd ever known to show me kindness. Hr had taken my loneliness away. And for that I knew I would always be grateful. But being grateful was not enough of a reason to stay with someone.
Patricia Park
The process of leniency involves accepting the reality of the current situation and finding a satisfying meaning therein, as opposed to misconstruing or denying the facts of the situation.
Sandra L. Schneider
There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays.The happy man does not look back. he doesn’t look ahead. he lives in the present. but there’s the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. to find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment.But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them. What have you chosen: happiness or meaning?'The interpretation of murder
Jed Rubenfeld
She folds the pages of the books she reads when she wants to remember something important. Her favorite books are accordions, testaments to an endless search for meaning.
Gary Shteyngart
If you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until you're sixty-five.
Morrie Schwartz
Not every illness can be overcome. But many people allow illness to disfigure their lives more than it should. They cave in needlessly. They ignore and weaken whatever powers they have for standing erect. There is always a margin within which life can be lived with meaning and even with a certain measure of joy, despite illness.
Norman Cousins
They wanted a list of symptoms: dizziness, blurred vision, palpitations. You could not say, it is a different life trying to nudge this one aside. I am meant to be living that different life. Who would understand that, if she could make no better sense of understanding it herself?
Jean Thompson
Secrets are revealed as you are ready to understand them. It seems capricious and mean-spirited of the Grimmerie to hold back, to yield and then to tease with a single page – but then the world is the same way, isn’t it. The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private language and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
Gregory Maguire
What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the older you get – the more specificity you harvest – the more precious becomes every ounce and spam. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
Gregory Maguire
Information may travel at light speed, but meaning spreads at the speed of dark.
Richard Powers
Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
William Kittredge
Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years aBarrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty aSoldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! AllRoads are fine Roads, beloved Sister, none more thananother, so that with one Life to spend I am a Manbare-bumm'd at Taylors with Cash for but one pair ofBreeches, or a Scholar at Brookstalls with Money for asingle Book: to choose ten were no Trouble; to choose one,impossible! All Trades, all Crafts, all Professions arewondrous, but none is finer than the rest together. Icannot choose, sweet Anna: twixt Stools my Breech fallethto the Ground!
John Barth
Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.
George Saunders
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
N. Scott Momaday
Now, here is the point about the self: it is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuff full.
Donald Barthelme
The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’.
Joyce Carol Oates
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
Ben Marcus
You are still what you think, despite what others think about you!
Dr. Vivencio Ballano
And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.
Joyce Carol Oates
Not like the me was some tough somebody, or somebody she had put together for show. But like, like somebody she favored and could count on. A secret somebody you didn't have to feel sorry for or have to fight for. -Felice
Toni Morrison
Now, what if Others were encapsulated in Things, in a way that Being towards Things were not ontologically severable, in Heidegger's terms, from Being towards Others? What if the mode of Dasein of Others were to dwell in Things, and so forth? In the same light, then, what if the Thing were a Dublette of the Self, and not what is called the Other? Or more radically still, what if the Self were in some fundamental way becoming a Xerox copy, a duplicate, of the Thing in its assumed essence?
Avital Ronell
When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.
Anne Carson
He was himself, and he knew what he had been.
John Williams
I still have a tendency to sit back and wait out the bad things that try and take over my life.
Dean Bakopoulos
one of the central themes associated with developing a sense of authenticity involves inventing plausible narratives of self. For instance, Charles Taylor (1992) argues that the modern desire for authenticity is often prompted by a feeling that our life is shattered and it is difficult, if not impossible, to piece our life together in a meaningful way. He suggests that reclaiming authenticity would entail the provision of a space where we can once again craft coherent narratives that bind our life together.
André Spicer
Refuse the old means of measurement.Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen.-From "Out West
Donika Kelly