Quotes by Professors - Page 6

Be careful about financial offers that often come by email. Before you respond to such an offer, ask yourself: do I really need a new problem?
Eraldo Banovac
Et supper?" Foote asked."No, sir," Stoner answered.Mrs. Foote crooked an index finger at him and padded away, Stoner followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she motioned him to sit at a table. She put a pitcher of milk and several squares of cold cornbread before him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry from excitement, would not take the bread.Foote came into the room and stood beside his wife. He was a small man, not more than five feet three inches, with a lean face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller, and heavy; rimless spectacles hid her eyes, and her thin lips were tight. The two of them watched hungrily as he sipped his milk. "Feed and water the livestock, slop the pigs in the morning," Foote said rapidly.Stoner looked at him blankly. "What?""That's what you do in the morning," Foote said, "before you leave for your school. Then in the evening you feed and slop again, gather the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. Weekends, you help me with whatever I'm doing.""Yes, sir," Stoner said.Foote studied him for a moment. "College," he said and shook his head.
John Williams
Chance was just an order that you hadn't yet perceived.
Richard Powers
Everyone says,Come to your senses, and I do, of you.Every touch electric, every taste you,every smell, even burning sugar, everycry and laugh. Toothpicked samplesat the farmers’ market, every melon,plum, I come undone, undone.
Dean Young
With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar.
Larry Watson
Connectivity becomes a craving.
Sherry Turkle
Children contend with parents who are physically close, tantalizingly so, but mentally elsewhere.
Sherry Turkle
Sometimes pain is God’s megaphone, his only way to get our attention.
Robert Hellenga
It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.
Tim Wu
We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our ''automatic'' attention as opposed to our ''controlled'' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.
Tim Wu
Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose—here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets. “Why does he have to forget?” Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn’t want to know, not really. But his mother’s back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear. She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. “So that for the rest of his life,” she said, “he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he’s forgotten.
Dara Horn
The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.
Chip Heath
Continuous denial of rational arguments represents a contempt of common sense.
Eraldo Banovac
For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations — and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches — the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.)
Ross Cheit
It is soon to be springThe Christmas toys barely played with I have a glass soldier whose head can turn The epaulettes interchangeable Soon flowers will bloom Lawrence from the garden shed will give us each a cup of seeds I am to wait I said
George Saunders
The thing about denial is that it doesn't feel like denial when it's going on.
Georgina Kleege
If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.
J. Budziszewski
Mr. Cope...' Povy began.Jem narrowed his eyes.'The lad has a remarkably innocent face.''Innocence is a time of life, not an irrevocable blot.
Eloisa James
Innocence is thought charming because it offers delightful possibilities for exploitation.
Mason Cooley
Her innocence was maddening. She should know. She should know what her steward had done. She should know it to be her fault whether she’d given the order or not–and whether she knew or not. Innocent? Her? Never.He did not want her to know. He did not want her to see. But:Look at me, he found himself thinking furiously at her. Look at me. She lifted her eyes, and did.
Marie Rutkoski
Each one of us needs to discover the proper balance between the masculine and feminine energies, between the active and the receptive. (104)
Ravi Ravindra
The body is not a product. It is an experience.
Daniele Bolelli
We also have to consider the many different kinds of rape we have learned about over the past few years as conservative politicians blunder through trying to explain their stances on sexual violence and abortion. For instance, Indiana treasurer Richard Mourdock, running for the US Senate in 2012, said, in a debate, "I struggled with it myself for a long time, and I realized that life is a gift from God, and I think even when life begins int hat horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen." I've been obsessing over these words, and trying to understand how someone who purports to believe in God can also believe that anything born of rape is God-intended. Just as there are many different kinds of rape, there are many different kinds of God. I am also reminded that women, more often than not, are the recipient of God's intentions and must also bear the burdens of these intentions. Mourdock is certainly not alone in offering up opinions about rape. Former Missouri representative Todd Akin believes in "legitimate rape" and the oxymoronic "forcible rape," not to be confused with all that illegitimate rape going on. Ron Paul believes in the existence of "honest rape," but turns a blind eye to the dishonest rapes out there. Former Wisconsin State representative Roger Rivard believes some girls, "they rape so easy." Lest you think these new definitions of rape are only the purview of men, failed Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut has introduced us to the idea of "emergency rape." Given this bizarre array of new rape definitions, it is hard to reconcile the belief that women are rising when there is still so much in our cultural climate working to hold women down. We can, I suppose, take comfort in knowing that none of these people is in a position of power anymore.
Roxanne Gay
Inadequate love is love. Unrequited love is love.
Lan Samantha Chang
Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there's sorrow. I don't envy the pain. But I envy you the pain. (p. 225)
André Aciman
What I wanted to preserve was the turbulent gasp in his voice which lingered with me for days afterward and told me that, if I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest. (p. 109)
André Aciman
The truth is that there is almost nothing as tiresome as unwanted love.
Sheila Kohler
If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don't snuff it out, don't be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we'd want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! (p. 225)
André Aciman
But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.
Gregory Maguire
And on that evening when we grow older still we'll speak about these two young men as though they were two strangers we met on the train and whom we admire and want to help along. And we'll want to call it envy, because to call it regret would break our hearts.
André Aciman
We're cool," I say calmly, although I feel something else. I feel... sad. Like I've lost something I never quite had.
Christine Seifert
It is not true that "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.
Andrew Solomon
If coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let's in celebration; / We have contained the population.
N. Scott Momaday
Black children need waves of present, multifaceted love, not simply present fathers.
Kiese Laymon
If other people owe you an apology, and your words of apology to them are proper and heartfelt, you still may not hear from them for a while. After all, what are the odds that they get to the right emotional place to apologize at the exact moment you do? So just be patient. Many times in my career, I saw students apologize, and then several days later, their teammates came around. Your patience will be both appreciated and rewarded.
Randy Pausch
It amazed Forrest that so many men seemed to wake up in the morning needing some kind of beating or another, men saying and doing fantastic things for the sake of getting another man to smash his face.
Matt Bondurant
He regarded marriage as an arbitrary and essentially adversarial relationship, akin to the yoking of prisoners on the chain gang.
T.C. Boyle
Proper apologies have three parts:1) What I did was wrong.2) I feel badly that I hurt you.3) How do I make this better?
Randy Pausch
Halfhearted or insincere apologies are often worse than not apologizing at all because recipients find them insulting. If you've done something wrong in your dealings with another person, it's as if there's an infection in your relationship. A good apology is like an antibiotic; a bad apology is like rubbing salt I the wound.
Randy Pausch
What man knows is little enough and most of his general concepts in every field are vitiated by the artificial concepts he has created to cover his ignorance. These concepts must be destroyed. One tool exists that can accomplish this destruction, and this tool is in your hands. It is simply curiosity—the instinct to ask and to question. It should be kept sharp and used without mercy.
Charles H. Hapgood
Was there a turn, a change in the atmosphere? To single out a particular moment is to distort the record, for it suggests a clear history of cause and effect that can only betray our sense of what really happened.
Steven Millhauser
There is no such complicated situation which people could not make more complicated.
Eraldo Banovac
Life is not complex at all when we do not think about it.
Eraldo Banovac
The main proof that you actually do not exist is that nobody ever criticizes you.
Eraldo Banovac
Is there any difference between a happy and a lucky man? A happy is someone who finds an oasis with drinking water in a desert. A lucky man will always find water.
Eraldo Banovac
By studying human history, we can realize how much of human stupidity has fallen on fertile ground. Is gravity guilty for such an occurrence too?
Eraldo Banovac
To smile sincerely is acceptable after making mistakes – that is the best way to feel cheerful and repeat the same mistakes.
Eraldo Banovac
If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against God's inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused.
J. Budziszewski
Eudora Welty singles out for praise Austen's "habit of seeing both sides of her own subject - of seeing it indeed in the round". ... Both men and women can be vain about their appearances, selfish about money, overawed by rank, and limited by parochialism; both men and women can function capably, think profoundly, feel deeply, create imaginatively, laugh wittily, and love faithfully. Without vindicating the rights of anyone directly, Austen posits a humanism far ahead of her time. "How really modern she is, after all," Welty concludes of Austen.
Emily Auerbach
It was during Latin that the Austro-Hungarians arrived with their dogs and zombies to kill everyone at the Eden College for Young Ladies.
David Wake
It had occurred to him that if the undead don't realize that they are dead, he might easily be one of them himself.
Dan Chaon
A woman is at her greatest peril in the presence of a beautiful man.
Jed Rubenfeld
You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, over a gesture. That's what happened with your girlfriend, Paloma- she stooped to pick up her purse and your heart flew out of you.
Junot Díaz
We're like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.
Aimee Bender
attraction, that's the farthest thing from an idea. That's an urge, an impulse, a force. It's subconscious, physical. You can't make everything cerebral.
Leah Stewart
What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again: purpose.
Claire Vaye Watkins
It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.
Alexander McCall Smith
She'd always thought that a broken heart sounded rather romantic. But in truth it was physical. Her whole chest ached, as if she'd been struck with a knife. With all her witless calculations about how to make a man desire her, she'd never realized that the most important thing was to make him like her. Or even love her. What a fool she was.
Eloisa James
Go ahead, scoff, he said, petulant. Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.
John Gardner
The difference between being Achilles and almost being Achilles is the difference between living and dying.
Thomas C. Foster