Quotes by Professors - Page 53

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.
Martin Amis
It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?
Joyce Carol Oates
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.
Roxane Gay
Popular! In America, what else matters?
Joyce Carol Oates
Taut, intelligent, and intense suspense that is deeply human.”—Mark Greaney, New York Times Bestselling Author of Gunmetal Gray“Exciting and well-layered....David Bell is a master storyteller with a sure hand at crafting characters you feel for and stories you relish.”—Allen Eskens, USA Today Bestselling Author of The Life We Bury“A tense and twisty suspense novel about the dark secrets that lie buried within a community and a father who can save his daughter only by uncovering them. Will leave parents wondering just how well they truly know their children.”—Hester Young, author of The Gates of Evangeline and The Shimmering Road“A gripping, immersive tour-de-force full of twists and turns. BRING HER HOME kept me flipping the pages late into the night. Don’t expect to sleep until you’ve finished reading this book. I could not put it down!”—A. J. Banner, bestselling author of The Good Neighbor and The Twilight Wife“In David Bell’s riveting BRING HER HOME, the unthinkable is only the beginning. From there, the story races through stunning twists all the way to its revelation, without letting its heart fall away in the action. Intense, emotional, and deeply satisfying. This one will keep you up late into the night. Don't miss it!”—Jamie Mason, author of Three Graves Full and Monday’s Lie“Spellbinding and pulse-raising, BRING HER HOME hooked me from the first sentence and surprised me until the final pages. Sharply written and richly observed, this book is about the secrets we keep, the mysteries that keep us, and the lengths a father will go to for the daughter he loves. David Bell is a masterful storyteller who has perfected the art of suspense in BRING HER HOME.”—Sarah Domet, author of The Guineveres
David Bell
You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source.
Joyce Carol Oates
Once evil is individualized, becoming part of everyday life, the way of resisting it also becomes individual. How does the soul survive? is the essential question. And the response is: through love and imagination.
Azar Nafisi
Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life
Martin Amis
They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction.'Poor Grendel's had an accident,' I whisper. 'So may you all.
John Gardner
One of pleasures of parenting, future reader: parent can positively influence kid, make moment kid will remember for rest of life, moment that alters his/her trajectory, opens up his/her heart + mind.
George Saunders
The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Joyce Carol Oates
God take what He would," she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing.
Toni Morrison
A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.So much worse, Mom said.But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't.You did so good, Mom said.Did beautiful, Dad said.
George Saunders
I guess you just have to trust your kids, trust that their innate interest in life will win out in the end, don’t you think?
George Saunders
Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
Betsy Hearne
You want a child because it is a link in the bridge that you are building between the past and the future, a cantilever that holds you, so that you are not alone.
Dan Chaon
It was hard not to realize what kind of kid his parents wished they'd had, and when he thought about that kind of kid it was tempting for Paul to want to track, hunt, and eat the little thing.
Ben Marcus
Every moment I have ever experienced as a child is as important as every moment I am experiencing now, or will experience ever. I guess what I'm saying is that not everybody should have children.
Gary Shteyngart
I wonder what children whose parents have money think about in their spare time.
Gary Shteyngart
I’m not holding myself out as a model, but I do believe that we in America can ask more of children than we typically do, and they will not only respond to the challenge, but thrive.
Amy Chua
Something must have happened, your mother speculated. In her mind a woman with no child could only be explained by vast untrammeled calamity. Maybe she just doesn't like children.Nobody likes children, Yunior, your mother assured you. That doesn't mean you don't have them.
Junot Díaz
Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.
Paul Russell
She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experience the long-held suspicion of our species, that the enchanted world of childhood is merely a mask for something else, a more subtle and paradoxical magic.- p. 157
Gregory Maguire
Grownups don't pay it much attention because they can't imagine anything more majestic to a child than their own selves and so confused dependance for reverence.
Toni Morrison
The best thing she was, was her children.
Toni Morrison
My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?
Gary Shteyngart
If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.
Anthony M. Esolen
Love and advise your children unconditionally.
Eraldo Banovac
There is no better way to influence children than being their role model.
Eraldo Banovac
Opinions are like ugly children … despite it all you love your own.
Scott Hutchins
Each child is a unique person, so raise your child taking this fact intoconsideration.
Eraldo Banovac
Now she and the widow had something in common, though loss did not pass from one person to another like a baton. It just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horses's mane, it did not leave, once lodged, did it? It simply changed form, and asked repeatedly for attention and care as each year revealed a new knot to cry out and consider, smaller, sure, but never gone...Out of my body, these beautiful monsters.
Aimee Bender
Thanks to the nation's testing mania (which I like to call 'No Child Left Untested' rather than 'No Child Left Behind'), children are being barraged with a nonstop volley of standardized tests. From kindergarten to graduate school, students are subjected to an unprecedented number of high-stakes tests
Laurie E. Rozakis
The recipe for each child is just for that child, even if it is the same mother and father.
Alexander McCall Smith
This is my favorite part of the day. “Good morning, Class Two C,” I say. The entire class leaps up and sings out, “Good morning, miss!” Twenty-three faces are smiling at me. Sometimes they shout it with so much conviction that I laugh.
Jamie Zeppa
I’ve just been transferred to Kanglung,” I say. They look at me to see if I am joking, and then they look at each other. There is a long, terrible silence and we all look at the floor. Karma Dorji wipes his runny nose on his sleeve and looks up. “Oh, miss,” he says sadly. “Please don’t go.”“Just a minute,” I say, and go into the bathroom. I latch the door and turn on the tap full force. When the water is running noisily, I lean my hot forehead against the damp, flaking concrete, and cry.
Jamie Zeppa
One feels such love for the little ones, such anticipation that all that is lovely in life will be known by them, such fondness for that set of attributes manifested uniquely in each: mannerisms of bravado, of vulnerability, habits of speech and mispronouncement and so forth; the smell of the hair and head, the feel of the tiny hand in yours—and then the little one is gone! Taken! One is thunderstruck that such a brutal violation has occurred in what had previously seemed a benevolent world. From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable.
George Saunders
He came out of nothingness, took form, was loved, was always bound to return to nothingness.
George Saunders
Reasoning does create a paradox: it leads both to more rule following and more rebelliousness. By explaining moral principles, parents encourage their children to comply voluntarily with rules that align with important values and to question rules that don’t. Good explanations enable children to develop a code of ethics that often coincides with societal expectations; when they don’t square up, children rely on the internal compass of values rather than the external compass of rules.
Adam Grant
Looking at the children, she knew that any hope for a new life would have to grow within her. She glanced at Nate, wondering if he felt as she did, that children were the only consolation in this world, the only recompense for so much suffering.
Laura Brodie
Kids use words in ways that release hidden meanings, revel the history buried in sounds. They haven't forgotten that words can be more than signs, that words have magic, the power to be things, to point to themselves and materialize. With their back-formations, archaisms, their tendency to play the music in words--rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, repetition--children peel the skin from language. Words become incantatory. Open Sesame. Abracadabra. Perhaps a child will remember the word and will bring the walls tumbling down.
John Edgar Wideman
Teaching our children to live a quiet, sane, and balanced life is one of the most important parental tasks of our day.
Brent L. Top
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?
Gregory Maguire
Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice - based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom - how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!
Alexander McCall Smith
The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.
Joyce Carol Oates
The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable-even legally actionable-to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty-lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self image.
Amy Chua
If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.
Rita Dove
There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.
Randy Pausch
Push away the past, that vessel in which all emotions curdle to regret.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Observing is the basis of wisdom.
Eraldo Banovac
Human experience always contains both pain and joy. One of the reasons we can be confident that Christianity is actually true is it allows us to make sense of both aspects of the world. Of both beauty and pain.
Holly Ordway
You can't fake joy. Authentic joy is the kind that grows out of the soil of pain and doubt and fear, because that is the reality of the world.
Holly Ordway
I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.
Gary Shteyngart
I will not stop singingthe Muses who set me dancing.
Anne Carson
Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don’t sleep like eyes. Those who live by the sea examine the driftwood and glass balls that float from foreign ships. They let scores of invisible imps loose out of found bottles. In a scoop of salt water, they revive the dead blobs that have been beached in storms and tides: fins, whiskers, and gills unfold; mouths, eyes, and colors bloom and spread. Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity.
Maxine Hong Kingston
(J)oy deserves always more.
Linda McCarriston
If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.
Marjorie Garber
No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you.
Toni Morrison
Oh, I have felt lust. And I've indulged lust. But no other woman has turned me into another person.
Eloisa James