Quotes by Professors - Page 56

...our minds are driven to answer questions that far transcend the bounds of our own lives.
Terryl L. Givens
What treaty is it that finally separates those two territories, the hard resolve of our exteriors and the terrible disaster on our insides?
Ben Marcus
The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well. Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.
Thomas Nagel
I am drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology, or teleological bias, as an account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate. I believe that teleology is a naturalistic alternative that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. To avoid the mistake that White finds in the hypothesis of nonintentional bias, teleology would have to be restrictive in what it makes likely, but without depending on intentions or motives. This would probably have to involve some conception of an increase in value through the expanded possibilities provided by the higher forms of organization toward which nature tends: not just any outcome could qualify as a telos. That would make value an explanatory end, but not one that is realized through the purposes or intentions of an agent. Teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are "biased toward the marvelous".
Thomas Nagel
The mind always found its way back to baseline.
Will McIntosh
Soon would come the night in which there was no more work – not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.
Paul Russell
She would never let anyone interfere with her right to use her mind.
Laurel Corona
There is a feeling the body gives the mindof having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like fallingwithout the sense that you are passing through one world,that you could reach anotheranytime. Instead the realis crossing you,your body an arrivalyou know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in betweenthese geese forever entering andthese spiders turning back,this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.
Jorie Graham
The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.
Toni Morrison
You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.
Toni Morrison
An unsolved problem bothers one's mind, just as a small stone in the shoe,until an idea for solving the problem comes to mind.
Eraldo Banovac
The human will to believe is inexhaustible
Thomas Nagel
The existence of conscious minds and their access to the evident truth of ethics and methematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our place in it has yet to explain.
Thomas Nagel
Anywhere - and, it follows, nowhere - can be a place. As long as we are there, to think and talk, to listen and respond. The world, once conscious of itself in the form of human making, is a vast concert hall. What sounds there is not the divine music of celestial spheres, as the ancient Greek mathematicians believed, but the sound of one human after another issuing the daily plea: to be heard, to be understood, to be accommodated.
Mark Kingwell
An idea occurs in the mind, where it is confined and useless. An idea lives when it leaves the mind.
Eraldo Banovac
Inside the human mind, an idea is a mental spark that occurs as a response to the challenge of a train of thought.
Eraldo Banovac
There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water’s waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.
Gregory Maguire
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
Gregory Maguire
Yoga practice can make us more and more sensitive to subtler and subtler sensations in the body. Paying attention to and staying with finer and finer sensations within the body is one of the surest ways to steady the wandering mind. (39)
Ravi Ravindra
Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?
Paul Russell
Someday, I'm going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.""I know," she said. "Try to do it behind my back, will you?¨You can bet on that, Mom.¨We both sat there and laughed.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Memory is capricious. I can look back and see decadence, old bigots, the constant racial slurs, the bores, the wild cards, the bighearted, the family album of alcoholics, the saints, the old aunt propped in a chair saying only "da-da," the slow-motion suicides, but at four, six, ten, they loomed, powerful, not as types but as themselves. Among them, logic takes wing." (pg. 31)
Frances Mayes
Every Saturday morning, first thing before breakfast, his parents held conferences with their children requiring them to answer two questions put to each of them: 1. What have you learned that is true (and how do you know)? 2. What problem do you have?
Toni Morrison
It is strangely wonderful to feel the lack of something instead of believing that it was never there in the first place.
Kevin Wilson
In fact, growing up, I thought there were two types of families:1) Those who need a dictionary to get through dinner.2) Those who don't.We were no. 1. Most every night, we'd end up consulting the dictionary, which we kept on a shelf just six steps from the table. "If you have a question," my folks would say, "then find the answer.
Randy Pausch
Would you have left a guy being beat up to go find a teacher?' I asked.My father, he wiped his hand across his face, and what was left behind was a smile.Really, a smile.'Not in a million years,' he said.
Gary D. Schmidt
As if each of us might somehow have a blueprint. As if somewhere there's the shape of my life, and I had the chance to choose a few variations, but not far from the pattern.
David Vann
Maybe all that silence about my brother did something to me. I think it did. Not talking can make a guy pretty lonely
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
All our lives my brother and I were caught by the fictions my parents told us—fictions about themselves as well as others. Each wanted us to judge the other in his or her favor. Sometimes I felt cheated, as if they never allowed us to have a story of our own. It is only now that I understand how much their story was also mine.
Azar Nafisi
Home is the people who love you.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Home isn't a place. It's not having a bed to come home to, or a yard, or a Christmas tree at the holidays. Home is the people who love you.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The problem is not that I don't love my mother and father. The problem is that I don't know how to love them.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors?Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical.
Jill Christman
If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them
Alexander McCall Smith
Because it is the lot of mothers to remember what no one else cares to, Mrs. Dutta thinks. To tell them over and over until they are lodged, perforce, in family lore. We are the keepers of the heart's dusty corners.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
Gregory Maguire
Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance.
Joyce Carol Oates
My house feels like home when you're there.
Susan Richards Shreve
I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.
Toni Morrison
Sometimes, having friends who were like family was a good thing, and sometimes, it was like having an endless supply of very nosy, very irritating siblings.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
You don't know what it's like to grow up with a mother who never said a positive thing in her life, not about her children or the world, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams. When my first pen pal, Tomoko, stopped writing me after three letters she was the one who laughed: You think someone's going to lose life writing to you? Of course I cried; I was eight and I had already planned that Tomoko and her family would adopt me. My mother of course saw clean into the marrow of those dreams, and laughed. I wouldn't write to you either, she said. She was that kind of mother: who makes you doubt yourself, who would wipe you out if you let her. But I'm not going to pretend either. For a long time I let her say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.
Junot Díaz
I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.
Toni Morrison
I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they're black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That's what we're upset about.
Toni Morrison
Christian faith undercuts the urge to fix everything on our own, through conviction of the final helplessness of man and confidence in the providence of God--through certainty that only God can set everything to rights, and faith that in the end, He will. Man can only ameliorate, not cure.
J. Budziszewski
What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?
Elie Wiesel
Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.
Michael Eric Dyson
Good managers don't set a goal to increase efficiency, but rather an implementation of business process improvements that result in higher efficiency as well.
Eraldo Banovac
Solving a complicated problem can be frustrating. You can have good problem solving skills, but sometimes a problem seems like it has no solution. Nevertheless, never give up.
Eraldo Banovac
Tell us which ideas you promote and we will know which type of person you are.
Eraldo Banovac
Thomas Randall and Christopher Golden not only are inventive writers but write in a sense to grab your attention cover to cover! I absolutely advise you to read,"The Waking" series. You'll love it if you are into the movie,"The- Grudge". I'm currently working on reading the second book of the trilogy.
Thomas Randall
He remembered believing there had been a time when monsters roamed the earth. The brave hearted fought flesh-and-blood dragons instead of shadowboxing their inner demons, the sport of modern man.
Katherine Starbird
Now she could smell what the jaguar could smell, odors deeper and richer than anything she had experienced before, layers of smell she could read like Fray Tomás had read the words in her father’s book: the wet decay of leaves, the death fear of a mouse, the poisonous cloy of datura, water and mud and insects, the wind carrying the smell of other animals, the wind itself, and the girl, of course, always the girl with her juicy flesh. The girl smelled incredibly good. Should the jaguar do this? Should Teresa eat herself?
Sharman Apt Russell
Cabeza de Vaca had wrapped her in his arms and in his language, whispering about a life she did not understand although understanding seemed to form just beyond the sea and sand, waiting there for her to grow older. Even when the story confused her, she had caught words or phrases, ideas like fish, bold and surprising, tasting of her father’s mind. She had learned quickly to nod and speak because he needed her to do this, because his need surrounded her like the blue sky. She was his bastard, and he had loved her. Yes, he had loved her. That was the memory she couldn’t bear.
Sharman Apt Russell
Come what may and hell to pay.
Gregory Maguire
The women in the kitchen sang: Sarampión toca la puerta. Viruela dice: ¿Quién es? Y Escarlatina contesta: ¡Aquí estamos los tres! The cook would sometimes shout a little madly, “Sing it again!” And the women would sing again: Measles knocks at the door. Smallpox asks, Who’s there? And Scarlet Fever replies: All three of us are here!
Sharman Apt Russell
The odd was the ordinary at Alistair Grim's. The people who lived there were odd. The things they did there were odd. Even the there itself there was odd.
Gregory Funaro
The Light shines brightest, when the world is at its darkest.
Michael Lackey
The Magical Negro rested his red cane on his shoulder and leisurely strolled into the forest to see if he could find him some hobbits, castles, dragons, princesses, and all that other shit.
Nnedi Okorafor