Quotes by Professors - Page 57

Sometimes thought Liir-his first thought in weeks and weeks-sometimes I hate this marvelous land of ours. It's so much like home, and then it holds out on you.
Gregory Maguire
People that are lazy don't get anything accomplished. It's People like me that are reliable.
Richard W. Todd
Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.
Gregory Maguire
What had survived - maybe all that had survived of Trism - was Liir's sense of him. A catalog of impressions that arose from time to time, unbidden and often upsetting. From the sandy smell of his sandy hair to the locked grip of his muscles as they had wrestled in sensuous aggression - unwelcome nostalgia. Trism lived in Liir's heart like a full suit of clothes in a wardrobe, dress habillards maybe, hollow and real at once. The involuntary memory of the best of Trism's glinting virtues sometimes kicked up unquietable spasms of longing.
Gregory Maguire
Children seem to need, then, a delicate balance between the realistic and the fantastic in their art; enough of the realistic to know that the story matters, enough of the fantastic to make what matters wonderful
Eric S. Rabkin
Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.
Gregory Maguire
Reality is shaped by the forces that destroy it.
D. Harlan Wilson
Fairy tales since the beginning of recorded time, and perhaps earlier, have been “a means to conquer the terrors of mankind through metaphor.
Jack D. Zipes
She remembered how her heart, so tight, like a scroll, had opened when Arin kissed her. It had unfurled. If her heart were truly a scroll, she could burn it. It would become a tunnel of flame, a handful of ash. The secrets she had written inside herself would be gone. No one would know
Marie Rutkoski
…mischief, …arises not from our living in the world, but from the world living in us; occupying our hearts, and monopolizing our affections.
Karen Swallow Prior
XXIV. And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud
Anne Carson
A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things.
Junot Díaz
She had always understood that love could have an intense physical effect; could fill a space somewhere in the chest, could turn knees weak, could raise the pulse; could intoxicate, just as could a strong martini or a glass of champagne. Could, she thought, and would…but only if you allowed it, only if you opened whatever portals of the heart needed to be opened. And some people, of course, found it difficult to do that.
Alexander McCall Smith
Chris is a little ashamed of having once fallen for him: it makes him sad how everything changes, how ruthless the heart can be.
Paul Russell
Maybe she loved me,maybe not –who knows?Not even the godscan see intoa human heart –it’s that dark.
Gregory Orr
We loved with every organ but the heart.
André Aciman
Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Patanjali says that we can meditate on anything that our heart desires. The important thing is not what we meditate on, but more that we meditate. And then gradually to meditate more and more on what corresponds to the innermost longing of our heart. The practice of meditation . . . gradually works its magic in stilling the mind. (42)
Ravi Ravindra
If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder."I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.
Chris Adrian
We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.
Aimee Bender
It seems quite pointless to waste health relentlessly in order to earn money that we shall spend on recovering health.
Eraldo Banovac
Refusing dominance over others by using money is a clear sign of wisdom.
Eraldo Banovac
Regarding quality, the following rule is very important: do each activity right at the first time with the aim of saving money and time. Regardless of the process under consideration, the activities that were carried out badly may cause repetitions with considerable additional costs.
Eraldo Banovac
Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.
Tim Wu
The value of money is subjective, depending on age. At the age of one, one multiplies the actual sum by 145,000, making one pound seem like 145,000 pounds to a one-year-old. At seven – Bertie’s age – the multiplier is 24, so that five pounds seems like 120 pounds. At the age of twenty four, five pounds is five pounds; at forty five it is divided by 5, so that it seems like one pound and one pound seems like twenty pence. (All figures courtesy of Scottish Government Advice Leaflet: Handling your Money.)
Alexander McCall Smith
Three miles from my adopted city lies a village where I came to peace.The world there was a calm place, even the great Danube no more than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscapeby a girl’s careless hand. Into this stillness I had been ordered to recover. The hills were gold with late summer;my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen, situated upstairs in the back of a cottage at the end of the Herrengasse. From my window I could see onto the courtyard where a linden tree twined skyward — leafy umbilicus canted toward light, warped in the very act of yearning —and I would feed on the sun as if that alone would dismantle the silence around me.At first I raged. Then music raged in me,t rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough to ease the roiling. I would stop to light a lamp, and whatever I’d missed — larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd’s home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and Iwould rage again. I am by nature a conflagration; I would rather leap than sit and be looked at.So when my proud city spread her gypsy skirts, I reentered, burning towards her greater, constant light.Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you, every tenderness I have ever known has been nothing but thwarted violence, an ache so permanent and deep, the lightest touch awakens it. . . . It is impossible to care enough. I have returned with a second Symphony and 15 Piano Variationswhich I’ve named Prometheus,after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god who knew the worst sin is to take what cannot be given back.I smile and bow, and the world is loud. And though I dare not lean in to shout Can’t you see that I’m deaf? —I also cannot stop listening.
Rita Dove
She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes.
Alexander McCall Smith
Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.
Alexander R. Galloway
People can enjoy music everywhere. Therefore, music is more than a giftbecause it represents a unique form of human freedom.
Eraldo Banovac
We will not sleep, but will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You'll see me again. But you'll never know when. Hear that shifting, ambiguous rhythm, that promise of all things possible, and the ear is on its way to being free.
Richard Powers
Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment. Beethoven’s Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
roughly 90 percent of songs have mating as their central theme, and this holds true regardless of cultural setting or historical period.
Gad Saad
Something tugged inside him. A flutter of unease.Do you sing? Those had been her first words to him, the day she had bought him. A band of nausea circled Arin’s throat, just as it had when she had asked him that question, in part for the same reason. She’d had no trace of an accent. She had spoken in perfect, natural, mother-taught Herrani.
Marie Rutkoski
Music was like food, like water, like air - that necessary, that essential - and here she was in a break-on-through mood and nothing for it but her own stumbling version caught like lint on her tongue.
T.C. Boyle
Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.
Alexander Chee
There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.
Gregory Maguire
He was making music - Howells, Finzi, Holst - so you could see the sounds in the serried air.Serried. Then just as suddenly empty when his sound-proof right hand closed off the notes.
Craig Raine
To grow a melody?" "You can't grow a melody on purpose,” she said, and slyly added, “you have to plant an accidental.
Gregory Maguire
We act out our lives to a soundtrack, thought Isabel, the music that becomes, for a spell, out favourite and is listened to again and again until it stands for the time itself. But that was about all the scripting that we achieved; the rest, for most of us, was extemporising.
Alexander McCall Smith
The verse is supposed to get you hard so the chorus can suck you off.
M. Thomas Gammarino
One person's data is another person's noise.
K.C. Cole
For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
The beauty of the flute was in its simplicity, in its resemblance to the human voice. It always sounded clear. It sounded alone. The piano, on the other hand, was a network of parts—a ship, with its strings like rigging, its case a hull, its lifted lid a sail. Kestrel always thought that the piano didn't sound like a single instrument but a twinned one, with its low and high halves merging together or pulling apart.
Marie Rutkoski
Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words
Elie Wiesel
Arin. I've wanted to do this for a long time."Her words silenced him, steadied him.Antecipation lifted within her like the fragance of a garden under the rain. She sat at the piano, touching the keys. "Ready?"He smiled. "Play.
Marie Rutkoski
Apologies often cannot undo pain; but they can acknowledge it. And part of the cruelty of bullying is that the bruises it leaves are on the inside—it’s a hidden form of violence, shrouded by shame.
Mathew N. Schmalz
…evangelicals were instrumental in advancing the ideal of companionate marriage, one built on shared faith and mutual affection, a revolutionary notion in an era in which forced marriages were a not-so-distant memory.
Karen Swallow Prior
Why doesn't anyone tell you we all wind up married to Henry the VIII?......My dear Anne Boleyn,...the only way a woman can avoid waking up next to Henry is to model herself after his daughter Elizabeth and sleep next to no one at all.
Judith Claire Mitchell
In our busy lives, intimacy often becomes a set piece—we sit down and make time for discussions, for togetherness, for sharing. But sometimes the most intimate parts of ourselves—our desires, our fears, our needs and sensitivities—are revealed most strongly in the course of our mundane routines.
Mathew N. Schmalz
Organizing the books was a fun afternoon. We decided to put the thick hardback books, mostly intro. to philosophy textbooks and Norton literature anthologies, on the top shelves where they looked good but stayed out of reach since there's no reason for opening them ever again. Then we went by genre: mysteries, cozies, modernists, mountains, sci-fi, beloved childhood volumes, books we bought abroad, books required in school we couldn't sell back, books bought for us we'll read soon, books bought for us we have no intention of reading, books we want to read but are too long for a commitment with our current schedules...We're not really done with this organization, and I doubt we ever will be, but that's one great part about it.
Joshua Isard
The unitive capacities of the spouses don't exist for nothing; they exist for motherhood and fatherhood. That is the matrix in which they develop, for children change us in a way we desperately need to be changed. They wake us up, they wet their diapers, they depend on us utterly. Willy-nilly, they knock us out of our selfish habits and force us to live sacrificially for others; they are the necessary and natural continuation of the shock to our selfishness which is initiated by matrimony itself.
J. Budziszewski
A young woman faces the decision of whether to marry a certain man whom she loves but who has deeply rooted, traditional ideas concerning marriage, family life, and the roles of men and women in each. A sober assessment of her future tell the woman that each of the two alternatives offers real but contrasting goods. One life offers the possibility of a greater degree of personal independence, the chance to pursue a career, perhaps more risk and adventure, while the other offers the rewards of parenting, stability, and a life together with a man whom, after all, she is in love with. In order to choose in a self-determined mode the woman must realize that the decision she faces involves more than the choice between two particular actions; it is also a choice between two distinct identities. In posing the questions "Who am I? Which of the two lives is really me?" she asks herself not a factual question about her identity but a fundamental practical question about the relative values of distinct and incommensurable goods. The point I take to be implicit in Tugendhat's (and Fichte's) view of the practical subject is that it would be mistaken to suppose that the woman had at her disposal an already established hierarchy of values that she must simply consult in order to decide whether to marry. Rather, her decision, if self-determined, must proceed from a ranking of values that emerges only in the process of reflecting upon the kind of person she wants to be.
Frederick Neuhouser
You are the joy in my life. I am a mess but I will be the joy in yours … When you touch me, you feel through me, through the ugliness beneath my skin, you make me feel, you hold me together, you push my skin back into its proper place. When you see me next, I will be wearing your ring on my left finger. I will say yes. You will hear me.
Roxane Gay
For Christians, especially postmodern Christians bereft of any consensus, sexual difference is a similar category. We will not know what it means until we allow God to tell us what it means. The tradition has claimed that we do not know who we are and what it means to find ourselves differentiated as men and women until we allow the premises and practices of revelation to unfold. In the tradition, stretching from Augustine to John Paul II, sexual difference is not mute, inert, nonexistent, or indifferent. In this tradition, God brings man to woman and tells the two sexes something they would not otherwise know: that their creation is good, that their creation as two sexes is for the sake of enabling a church and a covenant, and that, despite their fallenness, their twoness can in itself become a witness to reconciliation and redemption through marriage. Marriage gives this aspect of our creation the power to testify, and the nonmarried offer supporting testimony through their chastity, which creates the social ecology supporting marriage.
Christopher C. Roberts
Then Wanda proposed a health. "Health to abandoned wives!" she said. "Well now," I said. "'Abandoned,' that's a little strong." "Pushed out, jettisoned, abjured, thrown away," she said. "I remember," I said, "a degree of mutuality, in our parting." "And when guests came," she said, "you always made me sit in the kitchen." "I thought you liked it in the kitchen," I said. "You were forever telling me to get out of the bloody kitchen." "And when my overbite required correction," she said, "you would not pay for the apparatus." "Seven years of sitting by the window with your thumb in your mouth," I said. "What did you expect?" "And when I needed a new frock," she said, "you hid the Master Charge." "There was nothing wrong with the old one," I said, "that a few well-placed patches couldn't have fixed." "And when we were invited to the Argentine Embassy," she said, "you made me drive the car in a chauffeur's cap, and park the car, and stand about with the other drivers outside while you chatted up the Ambassador." "You know no Spanish," I pointed out. "It was not the happiest of marriages," she said, "all in all." "There has been a sixty percent increase in single-person households in the last ten years, according to the Bureau of the Census," I told her. "Perhaps we are part of a trend.
Donald Barthelme
To be happily married, as I've been fortunate enough to be, is to be a partner in a conversation that can last a full adult life. To have a true friend is to be able to test your hypotheses against someone who's receptive, but who won't give ground forever, and then let your friend try his wares out on you. At its best, friendly conversation is about giving up all claims to property and priority and engaging in collaboration--so that, at least for the two of you, something like an improvised musical composition in two parts is taking place. You do some rhythm to his lead; he lays down a bass line when you want to run the thing out into space. You both wind up saying things and thinking things that, alone, you never could have. This kind of hybrid mixing, this collaborative creation, is greatly to be treasured: it's one of the best parts of life.
Mark Edmundson
He evidently did not care that they were in full view of a cluster of dog-owners walking their dogs. He stopped and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately and urgently.
Alexander McCall Smith
If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.
Alexander McCall Smith
For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear.
Jed Rubenfeld
Was it possible to love a man who made you feel ridiculous? Of course [.....], love was complicated, that was all. Or was love simple, and marriage was complicated? In seventeen years of marriage David had often left her feeling frustrated, and furious, and disgusted, yes - but he had also made her feel beautiful, and protected, and loved. And oh, what she would give to feel loved right now.
Laura Brodie