Quotes by Professors - Page 7

You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.
Anthony M. Esolen
One day when we came to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest... Years later, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Out ship's passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the "natives," who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady, 'Please don't throw any more coins!' 'Why not?' said she. 'I like to give charity...
Elie Wiesel
States were barred from financing their immigration systems with specific taxes on immigrants and transportation companies, leaving the continued existence of these state institutions to the general state fisc or the generosity of private charitable organizations interested in immigrant welfare and integration. The resource strain on states and charitable organizations placed enormous pressure on Congress to enact federal law.
Pratheepan Gulasekaram
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
Chinua Achebe
At times I am flabbergasted that my memory is considered false and my alcoholic father's memory is considered rational and sane. Am I not believed because I am a woman? If Peter Freyd were a man who lived in my neighborhood during my childhood instead of my father, would he and his wife be so believable? If not, what is it about his status as my father that makes him more credible?
Jennifer J. Freyd
Disorder created connections──that is, resonance.
Eric Abrahamson
But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain.
John Williams
My laboratory is interested in the related challenges of understanding the origin of life on the early earth, and constructing synthetic cellular life in the laboratory. Focusing on artificial life frees us to explore novel chemical systems, but what we learn from these systems helps us to understand possible pathways leading to the origin of life. Our basic design for a synthetic cell involves the encapsulation of a spontaneously replicating nucleic acid, which acts as the genetic material, within a spontaneously replicating membrane vesicle, which provides spatial localization. We are using chemical synthesis to make nucleic acids with modified nucleobases and sugar-phosphate backbones.
Jack W. Szostak
Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
After all, we were young. We were fourteen and fifteen, scornful of childhood, remote from the world of stern and ludicrous adults. We were bored, we were restless, we longed to be seized by any whim or passion and follow it to the farthest reaches of our natures. We wanted to live – to die – to burst into flame – to be transformed into angels or explosions. Only the mundane offended us, as if we secretly feared it was our destiny . By late afternoon our muscles ached, our eyelids grew heavy with obscure desires. And so we dreamed and did nothing, for what was there to do, played ping-pong and went to the beach, loafed in backyards, slept late into the morning – and always we craved adventures so extreme we could never imagine them. In the long dusks of summer we walked the suburban streets through scents of maple and cut grass, waiting for something to happen.
Steven Millhauser
I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer – its dust and lowering skies.
Toni Morrison
Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
I'm turning you into a girlchasing a butterfly, a she-wolfon a hilltop, & then back into a woman.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she'd see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her...and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.
John Barth
Anybody can lose,' cautioned Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. 'You need to remember that every time you win.
Alexander McCall Smith
Against Self-PityIt gets you nowhere but deeper intoyour own shit--pure misery a luxuryone never learns to enjoy.
Rita Dove
The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.
Junot Díaz
You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.
Martin Amis
Life was fragile and love was, too. At any moment, even our happiest ones, our world could shatter and we wouldn’t see it coming. There was only more loss ahead, showing its ugly face when we least expected it.
Donna Freitas
As a result of my hike, I am much more inclined to "do" things. I will have fewer "should have done"s even if it means incurring some "wish I hadn't"s.
David Miller
history has no overall direction or purpose
Damien Keown
The Chinese construction of South Asia’s tallest edifice, the Lotus (a Lotus Sutra in Buddhism) Tower, both points to Beijing’s Peaceful Rise and unsettles some onlookers. For the nervous India and the United States, the cleverly designed and highly sophisticated rising communications tower is more than a Buddhist symbol of Peaceful Rise.
Patrick Mendis
Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.
Martin Amis
He dozed off, into a dreamless oblivion, for what seemed like seconds but was in fact hours, and awoke hungover, the inner surface of his skull pulsing like a single, giant nerve being chewed by some ruminant animal.
Alex Shakar
I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
Leslie Jamison
I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three handjobs yesterday. None was easy. Sometimes you really have to buckle down to it, as you do with all forms of exercise. It's simply a question of willpower. Anyone who's got the balls to stand there and tell me that a handjob isn't exercise just doesn't know what he's talking about. I almost had a heart-attack during number three. I take all kinds of other exercise too. I walk up and down the stairs. I climb into cabs and restaurant booths. I hike to the Butcher's Arms and the London Apprentice. I cough a lot. I throw up pretty frequently, which really takes it out of you. I sneeze, and hit the tub and the can. I get in and out of bed, often several times a day.
Martin Amis
When I walked into the house, I went in search of one of my dad's bottles. Not that they were that hard to find. He hid bottles all over the house. I knew where they all were. That was one of my hobbies, finding where my dad hid his bottles. It was my version of looking for Easter eggs. In my house, Easter lasted forever.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Go & tell your drinking buddies& psychoanalyst your neighborhas risen from the ashes. I wonderif I should tell you about the love lettershidden behind the doorjamb. This housestill stands among my lavender flowers.Tell your inheritors to think of mewhen they smile up at the sky.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Here, drink your liqueur," Henry said, tossing back her drink. "I carry it with me everywhere because it's the only kind of drink that Leo doesn't like, so there's a chance I'll still have some tomorrow.
Eloisa James
(…) Real time is not a unitary strand distributing homogeneous units of past, present and future in a fixed empirical order, but is rather a complex, interactive, « thick » manifold of distinct yet integrated durations. p22
Sanford Kwinter
Something in me died at Peleliu. Perhaps it was the childish innocence that accepted as faith the claim that Man is basically good. Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places, who do not have to endure war's savagery, will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it.
Eugene B. Sledge
In this way, you’ll live forever.
Adam Johnson
All those years of lurid magazine covers showing extremely nubile females being menaced in three distinct colors by assorted monstrosities; those horror movies, those invasion-from-outer-space novels, those Sunday supplement fright splashes—all those sturdy psychological ruts I had to re-track. Not to mention the shudders elicited by mention of 'worms,' the regulation distrust of even human "furriners,” the superstitious dread of creatures who had no visible place to park a soul.("Betelgeuse Bridge)
William Tenn
Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.
Anthony M. Esolen
He rarely saw a doorway without advancing through it as if he owned it. Since he owned a good many doorways, he would have pointed out that this was a reasonable assumption.
Eloisa James
It has generally been assumed that fairy tales were first created for children and are largely the domain of children. But nothing could be further from the truth.From the very beginning, thousands of years ago, when tales were told to create communal bonds in face of the inexplicable forces of nature, to the present, when fairy tales are written and told to provide hope in a world seemingly on the brink of catastrophe, mature men and women have been the creators and cultivators of the fairy tale tradition. When introduced to fairy tales, children welcome them mainly because they nurture their great desire for change and independence. On the whole, the literary fairy tale has become an established genre within a process of Western civilization that cuts across all ages. Even though numerous critics and shamans have mystified and misinterpreted the fairy tale because of their spiritual quest for universal archetypes or their need to save the world through therapy, both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.
Jack D. Zipes
Ultimately, the definition of both the wonder tale and the fairy tale, which derives from it, depends on the manner in which a narrator/author arranges known functions of a tale aesthetically and ideologically to induce wonder and then transmits the tale as a whole according to customary usage of a society in a given historical period. The first stage for the literary fairy tale involved a kind of class and perhaps even gender appropriation. The voices of the nonliterate tellers were submerged, and since women in most cases were not allowed to be scribes, the tales were scripted according to male dictates or fantasies, even though they may have been told by women. Put crudely, it could be said that the literary appropriation of the oral wonder tales served the hegemonic interests of males within the upper classes of particular communities and societies, and to a great extent this is true. However, such a statement must be qualified, for the writing down of the tales also preserved a great deal of the value system of those deprived of power. And the more the literary fairy tale was cultivated and developed, the more it became individualized and varied by intellectuals and artists, who often sympathized with those society marginalized or were marginalized themselves. The literary fairy tale allowed for new possibilities of subversion in the written word and in print, and therefore it was always looked upon with misgivings by the governing authorities in the civilization process.
Jack D. Zipes
The thing about fairy tales is that the princess find her prince, but there's usually a price to pay. A compromise is required for happily ever after. The woman in the fair tale is general the one who pays the price. This seems to be the nature of sacrifice.
Roxanne Gay
Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls. Even golden people live here. But misfortune is a dark power, a monstrous, cannibalistic giant, who is, however, vanquished, because a good woman, who happily knows how to avert disaster, stands ready to help.
Jack D. Zipes
The literary fairy tale became an acceptable social symbolic form through which conventionalized motifs, characters, and plots were selected, composed, arranged, and rearranged to comment on the civilizing process and to keep alive the possibility of miraculous change and a sense of wonderment.
Jack D. Zipes
As the literary fairy tale spread in France to every age group and every social class, it began to serve different functions, depending on the writer's interests. It represented the glory and ideology of the French aristocracy. It provided a symbolic critique, with utopian connotations, of the aristocratic hierarchy, largely within the aristocracy itself and from the female viewpoint. It introduced the norms and values of the bourgeois civilizing process as more reasonable and egalitarian than the feudal code. As a divertissement for the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, the fairy tale diverted the attention of listeners/readers from the serious sociopolitical problems of the times, compensating for the deprivations that the upper classes perceived themselves to be suffering. There was also an element of self-parody, revealing the ridiculous notions in previous fairy tales and representing another aspect of court society to itself; such parodies can be seen in Jacques Cazotte's "A Thousand and One Follies" (1746), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Queen Fantasque" (1758), and Voltaire's "The White Bull" (1774). Finally, fairy tales with clear didactic and moral lessons were approved as reading matter to serve as a subtle, more pleasurable means of initiating children into the class rituals and customs that reinforced the status quo.
Jack D. Zipes
It was only as part of the civilizing process that storytelling developed within the aristocratic and bourgeois homes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through governesses and nannies, and later in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries through mothers, who told bedtime stories.
Jack D. Zipes
The very name of the genre itself - fairy tale - originated during this time, for the French writers coined the term conte de fee during the seventeenth century, and it has stuck to the genre in Europe and North America ever since. This "imprint" is important, because it reveals something crucial about the fairy tale that has remained part of its nature to the present. The early writers of fairy tales placed the power of metamorphosis in the hands of women - the redoubtable fairies. In addition, this miraculous power was not associated with a particular religion or mythology, through which the world was to be explained. It was a secular mysterious power of compassion that could not be explained, and it derived from the creative imagination of the writer. Anyone could call upon the fairies for help, and it is clear that the gifted French women writers of the seventeenth century preferred to address themselves to a fairy and to have a fairy resolve the conflicts in their tales rather than the Church, with its male-dominated hierarchy. After all, it was the Church that had eliminated hundreds of thousands of so-called female witches during the previous two centuries in an effort to curb heretical and nonconformist beliefs. However, those "pagan" notions survived in the tradition of the oral wonder tale and surfaced in published form in France when it became safer to introduce in a symbolical code supernatural powers and creatures other than those officially sanctioned by the Christian code. In short, there was something subversive about the institutionalization of the fairy tale in France during the 1690S, for it enabled writers to create a dialogue about norms, manners, and power that evaded court censorship and freed the fantasy of the writers and readers, while at the same time paying tribute to the French code of civilite and the majesty of the aristocracy. Once certain discursive paradigms and conventions were established, a writer could demonstrate his or her "genius" by rearranging, expanding, deepening, and playing with the known functions of a genre that, by 1715, had already formed a type of canon, which consisted not only of the great classical tales-"Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty," "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Puss in Boots," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Blue beard, " "The Golden Dwarf," "The Blue Bird," and "The White Cat"-but also the mammoth collection The Arabian Nights.
Jack D. Zipes
A child’s best friend is often the one telling bedtime stories.
Eraldo Banovac
There is no greater achievement than being a grandfather who tells fairy tales to grandchildren.
Eraldo Banovac
Inevitably they find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest posses the power to change lives and alter destinies.
Jack D. Zipes
If there is one ‘constant’ in the structure and theme of the wonder tale, it is transformation.
Jack D. Zipes
The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.
Jack D. Zipes
The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
Leslie Jamison
We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.
Anthony M. Esolen
What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It’s close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.
Elie Wiesel
Your letter reminds me that any love that necessitates deception is not love. It doesn't matter if that supposed love is institutional or personal.
Kiese Laymon
Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.
Toni Morrison
In order to remember who you are, you have to have known it in the first place.
Gregory Maguire
It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.
Tim Wu
When one door closes another opens but all too often there is a long hallway in between.
Rick Jarow
Store speculates:Some creative people… of predominantly schizoid or depressive temperaments... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is a small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state... Is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility. For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not the case. Creative activity is a particularly apt way to express himself... The activity is solitary... [but] the ability to create and the productions which result from such ability are generally regarded as possessing value by our society.
Sylvia Nasar
Woodrow Wilson, like most other educated Americans of his time, despised mathematics, complaining that "the natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be leaned by painful process of drill.
Sylvia Nasar
Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.
Leslie Jamison
Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
Toni Morrison