Women Academics From The United States

"It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric."

"The purpose of time is to enable you to learn how to use time constructively. It is thus a teaching device and a means to an end. Time will cease when it is no longer useful in facilitating learning."

"I am a very careless person in some ways, I lose everything. But I never lost anything of this Course. People would would stop me in the subway and say, “Miss, you forgot your something or other, and hand it back to me.” Taxis would honk their horns, you know and say, “You left something in the back seat.” My secretary would say, “Are you sure this belongs in this case report, it doesn't sound right?” It was impossible to lose this Course, and I tried. But it...followed me around in an odd kind of way. People would send it back to me, anything. And I always got it back. We never lost anything, which is incredible."

"There’s nothing that I would call ordinary audition about this at all. It doesn’t really.. It’s a curious thing that will be very difficult to explain. Somebody asked me, “Was it as though your hand was moving?” No. I wrote perfectly voluntarily in response to…I call it a voice, but “a voice” has sounds...or sounds as though it has something to do with hearing. And I didn’t hear anything. I think it’s the sort of hearing that you can’t really describe. It doesn’t have anything to do with ears, or waves hitting a drum or anything on that order. I don’t really know, I think maybe I’m using the wrong word when I say “hear.” I sort of recognized it, it was very rapid, I could even....if I didn’t catch a phrase, I could sort of say, “Would you mind doing that again?”"

""I saw myself entering a cave in a rock formation on a bleak, windswept seacoast. The entrance to the cave was low, and the cave was quite deep. All I found in it was a very old and large parchment scroll. Its ends were rolled around heavy, gold-tipped poles, the two sides touching at the scroll's center and tied together by a strip of parchment that fell away as my fingers touched it. I untied the ends and opened the scroll just enough to expose the center panel, on which only two words were written; 'God is', and nothing else. …"As with the subway experience several years earlier, an aspect of the cave experience likewise found its way into the Course. The workbook states: "We say 'God is', and then we cease to speak, for in that knowledge words are meaningless" (W-pi. 169.5:4)."

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

"The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s Presence, Which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all encompassing can have no opposite."

"Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense."

"A man's memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become."

"A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both."

"There is, of course, a gold mine or a buried treasure on every mortgaged homestead. Whether the farmer ever digs for it or not, it is there, haunting his daydreams when the burden of debt is most unbearable."

"Housework is a breeze. Cooking is a pleasant diversion. Putting up a retaining wall is a lark. But teaching is like climbing a mountain."

"The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition."

"The primal and perennial work of social organization is not to fix the bounds of behavior as permanent lines, which would make all evolutionary process impossible, but to retrieve the vital balance every time some act, public or private, has upset it."

"In a work of art, however modest, the peculiar character of life is always reflected in the fact that it has no parts which keep their qualitative identity in isolation. In the simplest design, the virtual constituents are indivisible, and inalienable from the whole."

"Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature."

"Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience, rather than adding to experience itself, as factual learning and experimental investigation do."

"Probably the profoundest difference between human and animal needs is made by one piece of human awareness, one fact that is not present to animals, because it is never learned in any direct experience: that is our foreknowledge of death. The fact that we ourselves must die is not a simple and isolated fact. It is built on a wide survey of facts that discloses the structure of history as a succession of overlapping brief lives, the patterns of youth and age, growth and decline; and above all that, it is built on the logical insight that one’s own life is a case in point. Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life."

"The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling."

"Tragedy dramatizes human life as potentiality and fulfillment. Its virtual future, or Destiny, is therefore quite different from that created in comedy. Comic Destiny is Fortune—what the world will bring, and the man will take or miss, encounter or escape; tragic Destiny is what the man brings, and the world will demand of him. That is his Fate."

"Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling."

"Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life."

"Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know."

"It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age. Science builds its structure of hypothetical "elements" and laws of their behavior, touching on reality at crucial points.[…] But the historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it."

"Common-sense knowledge is prompt, categorical, and inexact."

"The men in the laboratory [...] cannot be said to observe the actual objects of their curiosity at all.[...] The sense data on which the propositions of modern science rest are, for the most part, little photographic spots and blurs, or inky curved lines on paper.[...] What is directly observable is only a sign of the "physical fact"; it requires interpretation to yield scientific propositions."

"If we would have new knowledge, we must get us a whole world of new questions."

"The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it—right or wrong—may be given."

"Poetry is a magic of pauses ... not a thing of tunes, but of heightened consciousness."

"I discovered that the woman poet most admired at the time (by men) was Marianne Moore, who was maidenly, elegant, intellectual, discreet."

"Until recently this female anger and this furious awareness of the Man's power over her were not available materials to the female poet, who tended to write of Love as the source of her suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate. Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept sexuality at a measured and chiseled distance in her poems."

"I created a "dream world" that I tried grounding absolutely and solidly in a real place, the Napa Valley, which I know stone by stone. Marianne Moore said real toads in imaginary gardens is what poetry is about. Well, what I did was create imaginary toads in a real garden. I tried working out in that book the world that I think I would like best to live in. Although this one will do."

"Although Le Guin tended to discount the distinction between dream-world and "real" world, she made a sharp distinction between the real world and the world of science fiction. When asked if there is really a difference between what we call reality and science fiction, she retorted decisively: "You bet you there is. You keep that firmly in mind. It's a fiction. You know what Marianne Moore said about imaginary gardens with real toads-sometimes there are real gardens with imaginary toads in them. But it's a mixture. Fiction writers write fiction, particularly in science fiction. People forget this and say they are describing reality or they are predicting reality. But the very most that a fiction writer can do is offer an option.""

"Marianne Moore is fundamental, and not only for having published poets of great intensity, such as Hart Crane, in the Dial, her splendid poetry review. It is difficult to define her contribution, so decisive it appears to me, but I am certain that she is our most original poetess, the one who has brought a brilliant precision to poetic language by means of a meticulous conservatism. Her extremely personalized style is at this moment influencing the young poets of the United States. She has succeeded in introducing a great variety of poetic motives, maintaining the ancestral, 'out-of-date' virtues of American culture-such as irony, a subtle sense of humor, understatement-while keeping herself at the same time within the creative vanguard of poetry in the English language."

"We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained."

"Love, ah Love, when your slipknot's drawn, One can but say, "Farewell, good sense.""

"The problems is mastered — insupportably tiring when it was impending. Deliverance accounts for what sounds like axiom. The Gordian knot need not be cut."

"Staff and effigy of the animal which by shedding its skin is a sign of renewal — the symbol of medicine."

"A symbol from the first, of mastery, experiments such as Hippocrates made and substituted for vague speculation stayed the ravages of plague."

"Maine should be pleased that its animal is not a waverer, and rather than fight, lets the primed quill fall. Shallow oppressor, intruder, insister, you have found a resister."

"What of it? We call them brave perhaps? Yes; what if the time should come when no one will fight for anything and there's nothing of worth to save."

"We Call Them the Brave who likely were reluctant to be brave."

"Some speak of things we know, as new; And you, of things unknown as things forgot."

"Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time."

"What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe."

"He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco brimming with inner light — that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero."

"So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear but never caught, the unicorn has been preserved by an unmatched device wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths ..."

"This is a strange fraternity — these sea lions and land lions, land unicorns and sea unicorns; the lion civilly rampant, tame and concessive like the long-tailed bear of Ecuador — the lion standing up against this screen of woven air which is the forest: the unicorn also, on its hind legs in reciprocity."

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint."

"My father used to say "Superior people never make long visits.""