Women Academics From The United States

"She watched the indigo sky, and the stars coming out tranquil as ever, as if this were any ordinary evening. Only humans knew what an evil time this was."

"You are as responsible for what you let happen as for the actions you share."

"Death hastens those who hasten death."

"There was no time for bitterness now: eat bitterness, and bitterness eats you."

"Death can be hastened but never shared."

"Usha had said that males were not all that different, just bigger outside to make up for what they lacked within."

"“Magic is nonsense.” “Magic is anything you don’t understand.”"

"Of all the well-meant emotions pity is the cruelest to share."

"A life postponed too long might never be lived."

"Few fears are rational."

"“People fear stone,” Usha said, “because it contains never-life.” “Non-life? You mean, death?” “Nonsense,” she repeated vehemently. “What’s to fear about death? Death is natural. Stone is never-life.” Spinel took another tack. “If they fear it, then how come enough Sharers want it so the traders stock shelves full?” “How should I know? Why do Valans drink the toxic waste product of sugar-eating yeast?”"

"She tended to keep her eyes half closed, as if full sight of the world’s absurdity might be too much to bear."

"Herbert von Karajan always rolled out a magic carpet for us, the singers. With him, our musical work took on another dimension."

"The objection that consequentialism demands too much is accepted uncritically by almost all of us."

"A vegetarian in his everyday life, [Shelly Kagan] orders meatless meals when he flies. Airlines, however, sometimes fail to deliver on such requests. If that happens, and he is offered a meat meal that he knows will be thrown out if he doesn't eat it, he'll eat it. In these circumstances-in contrast to buying meat at the supermarket-his consumption of meat seems to make no difference to the demand for it."

"My view [is] that what morality boils down to is, “Don’t harm, and do help.” And now the question is, “Can creatures like chickens and cows be harmed?” And the answer is, “Of course they can.” Consequently, I think it’s immoral to harm them. And that seems to me to provide a very strong moral reason to be vegetarian, to not wear leather... it seems to me that our treatment of animals is morally appalling... and that we ought to radically revise the way we live, precisely because they feel pain, they can be hurt, and we’re constantly hurting these creatures!"

"If you put it as “complex nervous systems” it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics… to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked “What’s so special about humans...?”, I’m at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don’t see why we’d be special… because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I’m not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point. ...I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, “You are guys are really, really special.” How does his saying it make us special? “But you see, he gave us a soul.” How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say… “What’s so special about that?”"

"Those readers troubled by the fact that millions of people will die this year, who could have been saved for a few dollars each, might want to consider making a contribution to Oxfam."

"Shame hates to have words wrapped around it. If we talk about it, it loses its grip on us."

"Science is not the truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn’t lie to you. It learned more."

"Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid."

"The near enemy of love is attachment...True love allows, honors, and appreciates; attachment grasps, demands, needs, and aims to possess."

"People will do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power"

"I’ve learned that power is not bad, but the abuse of power or using power over others is the opposite of courage; it’s a desperate attempt to maintain a very fragile ego."

"(What’s the last great book you read?) TA: “Daring Greatly,” by Brené Brown! I was really moved by her Netflix special, and listening to her audiobook came at the perfect time in my life. She has a way of perfectly describing some of the most intimate human emotions and experiences, and she provides concrete, actionable solutions. She gave me a new level of self-awareness that’s helped me navigate my life in a meaningful way, so I’m a big fan."

"We have to belong to ourselves as much as we need to belong to others. Any belonging that asks us to betray ourselves is not true belonging."

"just as healing physical pain requires describing it, talking about it, and sometimes getting professional help, we need to do the same thing with emotional pain."

"When we’re faced with information that challenges what we believe, our first instinct is to make the discomfort, irritation, and vulnerability go away by resolving the dissonance. We might do this by rejecting the new information, decreasing its importance, or avoiding it altogether. “The greater the magnitude of the dissonance, the greater is the pressure to reduce dissonance.” In these challenging moments of dissonance, we need to stay curious and resist choosing comfort over courage. It’s brave to invite new information to the table, to sit with it and hear it out."

"Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our greatest measure of courage."

"Worrying and anxiety go together, but worry is not an emotion; it’s the thinking part of anxiety."

"‘Crazy-busy’ is a great armor, it’s a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we’re feeling and what we really need can’t catch up with us."

"...the biggest mistake people make is not acknowledging fear and uncertainty."

"Healthy striving is about striving for internal goals, and wanting to be our best selves. Perfectionism is not motivated internally. Perfectionism is about what people will think. And you do not see effective leaders in corporations sitting on an email for three hours to make sure it’s worded just perfectly. You don’t. They have work to get done..You don’t see elite athletes letting themselves be discouraged by a bad workout or a single bad performance. It happens all the time. They’re accustomed to winning, they’re accustomed to losing. Once perfectionism becomes the goal, they’re out of the sport."

"Belonging is not fitting in...Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you're enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect. When we don't have that, we shape-shift and turn into chameleons; we hustle for the worthiness we already possess."

"The thing that I have learned is that vulnerability is at the center of fear and shame, but it is also at the center of joy and gratitude and love and belonging...If we continue to wake up every day and put our game faces on and think that invulnerability is the way to be … then we pay the price, because I don't know that we would ever fully experience joy and love and belonging."

"I believe my poetry reflects an intense relationship to the music of the spoken word. Writing plays involves not only language, but the interplay of various languages-different characters' varying speech patterns and inflections, personalities-as well as the visible rhythms of bodies relating to each other. A domestic scene in a play is like a string quartet."

"I discovered that poetry and drama have more in common than Aristotle, with his "classic dramatic unities," may have cared to admit. Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama was "life the with the dull bits cut out," and Gwendolyn Brooks defines poetry as "life distilled"-where's the big difference? For if a poet planes away unnecessary matter so that we can see clearly to the very core of the soul, a playwright commits the same sacred enterprise by training her spotlight on some select souls and then summoning the audience to listen, to bear witness in the dark."

"There are poets I return to again and again for sustenance: I read them, shake my head and wonder, How did they do that? I go back to figures like Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy, for example, and Langston Hughes and Shakespeare, and some prose writers as well - James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"I am deeply grateful to the women who really blazed the way-poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin."

"The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world."

"I am Rita Dove, the beautiful dove. See my black neck, see my speck. My ass is not so much cracked but i want to get out now. The poet, am I. Am me."

"The forces of men’s material and perceptual violence mold Woman to dependence upon Man, in every meaning of 'dependence': contingent upon; conditional upon; necessitated by; defined in terms of; incomplete or unreal without; requiring the support or assistance of; being a subordinate part of; being an appurtenance to."

"Western philosophy and science have for the most part been committed to the Simplicity Theory of Truth: the simplest theory that accounts for the data is the true theory. (Theories are simplest which postulate the fewest entities, require the fewest hypotheses, generate predictions by the fewest calculations, etc.) ...If someone believes that the world is made for him to have dominion over and he is made to exploit it, he must believe that he and the world are so made that he can, at least in principle, achieve and maintain dominion over everything. But you can’t put things to use if you don’t know how they work. So he must believe that he can, at least in principle, understand everything. If the world exists for man, it must be usably intelligible, which means it must be simple enough for him to understand. A usable universe is an intelligible universe is a simple universe. ...And so it goes with the philosophy and the science of The Arrogant Eye."

"Men see with arrogant eyes which organize everything seen with reference to themselves and their own interests."

"Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon."

"Efficient exploitation requires that those exploited be relatively mobile, self-animating and self-maintaining—the more so as the work in question requires greater intelligence, attention or ingenuity. But it also requires that they not be free enough, strong enough or willful enough to resist, escape or significantly misfit the situation of exploitation."

"Efficient exploitation of “human resources” requires that the structures that refer the others’ actions to the exploiter’s ends must extend beneath the victim’s skin. The exploiter has to bring about the partial disintegration and re(mis)integration of the others’ matter, parts and properties so that as organized systems the exploited are oriented to some degree by habits, skills, schedules, values and tastes to the exploiter’s ends rather than, as they would otherwise be, to ends of their own. In particular, the manipulations which adapt the exploited to a niche in another’s economy must accomplish a great reduction of the victim’s intolerance of coercion."

"What the exploiter needs is that the will and intelligence of the victim be disengaged from the projects of resistance and escape but that they not be simply broken or destroyed. Ideally, the dis-integration and mis-integration of the victim should accomplish the detachment of the victim's will and intelligence from the victim’s own interests and their attachment to the interests of the exploiter. This will effect a displacement or dissolution of self-respect and will undermine the victim’s intolerance of coercion. With that, the situation transcends the initial paradigmatic form or structure of coercion; for if people don’t mind doing what you want them to do, then, in a sense, you can’t really be making them do it. In the limiting case, the victim’s will and intelligence are wholly transferred to a full engagement in the pursuit of the dominating person’s interests. The “problem” had been that there were two parties with divergent interests; this sort of solution (which is very elegant, as that word is used in logic) is to erase the conflict by reducing the number of interested parties to one. This radical solution can properly be called “enslavement.”"

"While what was said [in reference to the content Frye personally removed from her Wikipedia entry] could easily be extrapolated from my work, I have never written a word linking C. S. Lewis to male prostitution before. I am not Captain Obvious from Hotels.com!"

"If we have no intuition of ourselves as independent, unmediated beings in the world, then we cannot conceive ourselves surviving our liberation; for what our liberation will do is dissolve the structures and dismantle the mechanisms by which Woman is mediated by Man. If we cannot imagine ourselves surviving this, we certainly will not make it happen."