Saturday, August 28, 2010

From Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

"There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes."

Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston

Saturday, July 10, 2010

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

"Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay."
--Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Sunday, December 6, 2009

From Zadie Smith's On Beauty

"To enact with one sudden tug (like a boy removing his friend's shorts in front of the opposing team) a complete exposure, a cataclysmic embarrassment - this is one of the purest academic pleasures" (29).

Friday, June 5, 2009

From A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book

A lovely quote from The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt, on the joys of putting together a syllabus:

"There is a particular aesthetic pleasure in constructing the form of a syllabus, or a book of essays, or a course of lectures. Visions and shadows of people and ideas can be arranged and rearranged like stained-glass pieces in a window, or chessmen on a board" (119).

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Commonplace Book, Entry 1

From Trinh T. Minh-ha's Woman Native Other:

"In a sense, committed writers are the ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience" (10-11).