Quotes by Professors - Page 42

You grow. You are large. You are a 19th century poem.All of America is inside you,a catalogue of lives and landand burrowing things.-From "Catalogue
Donika Kelly
Like the turtle's shell, the sense of self serves as a shield against stimulation and as a burden which limits mobility into possibly dangerous areas. The turtle rarely has to think about what's on the other side of his shell; whatever it is, it can't hurt him, can't even touch him. So, too, adults insist on the shell of a consistent self for themselves and their children and appreciate turtles for friends; they wish to be protected from being hurt or touched or confused or having to think. If a man can rely on consistency, he can afford not to notice people after the first few times. But I imagined a world in which each individual might be about to play the lover, the benefactor, the sponger, the attacker, the friend: and once known as one of the next day he might yet be anything. Would we pay attention to this person? Would life be boring? Would life be livable? I saw then clearly for the first time that the fear of failure keeps us huddled in the cave of self - a group of behavior patterns we have mastered and have no intention of risking failure by abandoning.
Luke Rhinehart
We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...
Gregory Maguire
But I will confess 
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.
Troy Jollimore
The Self says ‘I AM’–as in the very grand sayings of Christ, especially in the Gospel of John, in which he says in the state of onenenss with Yahweh (which in Hebrew means ‘I AM’), I AM is the way and the truth and the life–but the ego says ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that,’ thus attaching itself only to a small portion of the Vastness. (62)
Ravi Ravindra
All storytelling is a form of travel. All of the things you know you should do when traveling this world apple in Elfland as well. The Charms will open the doors to strange and wondrous lands, so some travel tips and runic etiquette may be in order: Be polite. Don't take anything without asking. Laugh at their jokes. Remember, humor is sacred: so is hospitality. Beware of the dark woods at night. Do not trust the wolf in winter. Take notes. Sing for your supper. Pack extra sandwiches. Bring fine gifts. Always tell a story when asked. Listen as if your life depended on it. Start early. Walk the land. Keep your eyes open. Travel wisely and well. Come back safe and sound.
Ari Berk
All storytelling is a form of travel. All of the things you know you should do when traveling this world apply in Elfland as well. The Charms will open the doors to strange and wondrous lands, so some travel tips and runic etiquette may be in order: Be polite. Don't take anything without asking. Laugh at their jokes. Remember, humor is sacred: so is hospitality. Beware of the dark woods at night. Do not trust the wolf in winter. Take notes. Sing for your supper. Pack extra sandwiches. Bring fine gifts. Always tell a story when asked. Listen as if your life depended on it. Start early. Walk the land. Keep your eyes open. Travel wisely and well. Come back safe and sound.
Ari Berk
In the progressive growth of astronomy, physics or mechanical science was developed, and when this had been, to a certain degree, successfully cultivated, it gave birth to the science of chemistry.
Justus von Liebig
Growth and change were viewed as reactions to conditions met
Gregory Maguire
If at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we could paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive - if only for a few seconds more - the possibility of transformation. -The Thought Experiment
George Saunders
That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.
Dana Spiotta
I felt the pain and the glory of growth, was straining and shuddering with it.
Nnedi Okorafor
We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
She loved sinking into her bed on evenings like this, but apparently she shouldn't, because it worried her aunts, who thought she ought to be out dancing. It worried her a little bit, too, because what if they were right, and because sometimes a great loneliness welled up in her and threatened all the dams she built to hold it back. You couldn't cure loneliness by wallowing in it, up above the world, on an island removed from everything. She knew that. But she had such a hard time with all the cures. They seemed rough and brusque and brutal, as if they abused her skin with a pot scrubber . . . forcing herself into a mass of people, a stranger among strangers. . . . But it was much more tempting to curl up with a book under her thick white comforter.Still, sometimes after she curled up, she regretted her lack of courage and felt bleakly l
Laura Florand
Let’s just say, by the end of her second quarter Beli could walk down the hall without fear that anyone would crack on her. The downside of this of course was that she was completely alone.
Junot Díaz
My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else.
Ben Marcus
I’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That’s me.A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
It was an intensely lonely moment, like all of eighth grade condensed into one claustrophobic second.
Lisa Rowe Fraustino
One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, so there was rarely any time to get to know a new place, let alone new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anything to fill me up.
Roxane Gay
Dad? Dad, no. No. I can't. I can't. Why are you saying these things?""Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
We go from curiosity to a search for communion.
Sherry Turkle
With solitude, however, fervently it is desired and embraced, comes loneliness. T. H White, the author, offered advice to those in sadness -- learn something new.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while.
Ben Marcus
I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.
Junot Díaz
There were people everywhere but no one was mine, and I was no one's.
Gregory Maguire
She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
Toni Morrison
I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Lonely was much better than alone.
Toni Morrison
Do not really like rich people, as they make us poor people feel dopey and inadequate. Not that we are poor. I would say we are middle. We are very, very lucky. I know that. But still, it is not right that rich people make us middle people feel dopey and inadequate.
George Saunders
In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.
Junot Díaz
The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education.
Gary Shteyngart
Measurement aside, there are two reasons aggregate growth might matter. The first is to create jobs to assimilate the unemployed and anticipate increases in population. The second is to improve living standards. Economic logic does not require overall expansion to achieve either of these objectives. An expanding labour force can be accommodated if hours of work fall. And it's productivity growth, rather than the overall size of the economy, that drives improvements in living standards. Getting bigger doesn't necessarily yield wealth; improving productivity does.
Juliet Schor
The ladies in her classes loved to speak to Caridad in broken Spanish, to show her they were comfortable with her ethnicity despite the paleness of their skin and the wealth of their husbands.
Roxane Gay
Was there little time between the invention of language and the coming of true and false?
Mason Cooley
...Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.
Anne Carson
Don't want to think about it? No problem. Don't think about it.
Bee Ridgway
There's a war between two wolves inside everybody. One is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. The other's good. It's love, peace, beauty, happiness, truth, hope, joy, humility, kindness, and empathy. "Who wins...?""The one you feed".
MK Asante
The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.
Marie Rutkoski
When we don't automatically take them (thoughts) personally or believe the stories about "reality" that we build from them,when we can simply hold them in awareness with a sense of curiosity and wonder at their amazing power given their insubstantiality, their limitations,and inaccuracies,then we have a chance right in that moment,in any moment really,to not get caught in their habitual patterning,to see thoughts for what they are,impersonal events.Then in that moment at least, we are already free,ready to act with greater clarity and kindness within the constantly changing field of events that is nothing other than life unfolding-- not always as we think it should,but definitely as it is.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
His jargon conceals, from him, but not from us, the deep, empty hole in his mind. He uses technological language as a substitute for technique.
Richard Mitchell
It is commonplace to talk as if the world "has" meaning, to ask what "is" the meaning of a phrase, a gesture, a painting, a contract. Yet when thought about, it is clear that events are devoid of meaning until someone assigns it to them.
Dean C. Barnlund
The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.
Frances Mayes
It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.
Frances Mayes
When given the chance to see China off the beaten track, definitely take it.
Larry Herzberg
The sacrifices of time and money that Chinese friends will make for one another often go far beyond what is expected or accepted in Western society.
Larry Herzberg
Don’t take everything for granted, and do not always count on finding everything you need.
Larry Herzberg
What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.
André Aciman
Contentment can only be found in not envying others or comparing yourself to them but in being satisfied with what you have.
Larry Herzberg
And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, "go.
Frances Mayes
Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?
Leslie Jamison
There is a difference between arrival and entrance. Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plan touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your luggage. You can arrive a place and never really enter it; you get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over, slowly, in bits and pieces. […] It is like awakening slowly, over a period of weeks. And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are.
Jamie Zeppa
I love how the landscape gives the impression of vast space and intimacy at the same time: the thin brown line of a path wandering up an immense green mountainside, a plush hanging valley tucked between two steep hillsides, a village of three houses surrounded by dark forest, paddy fields flowing around an outcrop of rock, a white temple gleaming on a shadowy ridge. The human habitations nestle into the landscape; nothing is cut or cleared beyond what is requires. Nothing is bigger than necessary. Every sign of human settlement repeat the mantra of contentment: “This is just enough.
Jamie Zeppa
Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. […] Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic.
Jamie Zeppa
English has so many words that do not exist in Sharchhop, but they are mostly nouns, mostly things: machine, airplane, wristwatch. Sharchhop, on the other hand, reveals a culture of material economy but abundant, intricate familial ties and social relations. People cannot afford to make a distinction between need and desire, but they have separate words for older brother, younger sister, father’s brother’s sons, mother’s sister’s daughters. And there are 2 sets of words: a common set for everyday use and an honorific one to show respect. There are three words for gift: a gift given to a person higher in rank, a gift to someone lower, and a gift between equals.
Jamie Zeppa
What I love is how seamless everything is. You walk throw a forest and come out in a village; and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.
Jamie Zeppa
One week after New Year's Day in 2006, I was on a flight to Aceh…As we walked down the steps on to the tarmac, the air felt humid and tropical, familiar and almost Balinese. It felt like going home. As the heavy air embraced me, my first inclination was to relax into it, but yet this was not home and my entire body remained on edge.
Alexandra Harris
It is not 2006 all over the world. So who are you in a place where 1950 or 1920 is about to arrive?
Frances Mayes
The stupa is a white dome with a conical stone tower emerging from its center. There are two eyes painted on the tower, the all seeing eyes of Buddha. They're purple, and look a little sinister, like an Old Testament Buddha.
Joshua Isard
Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.
Andrew Solomon
A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.
Amy Hempel