Williams College Faculty

"“A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.”"

"Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase."

"What if we were to have revealed to us that misfortune can lend life quality?"

"I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that was not my place, but rather I’d keep watch over its decline."

"The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow’s feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged."

"“Adrian's tone suggested that the desire for something was all it took. They all live with endless possibilities, leave their homes for the sake of something new. But the dream is woven from the fabric of freedom. For desire to exist it requires the element of possibility, and that for Kai has never existed, until now...”"

"“I had spent my whole life trying not to be like my mother. I had taken the opposite path and hurried along it, all the time looking over my shoulder instead of ahead, so that I failed to see how the path curved back again in the same direction.”"

"“I knew when not to speak, when not to let myself be heard. Silence was my friend, my twin, the other half of me. Silence was my weapon. Not a blustering gun, but an invisible spider’s web.”"

"How it only seems to be evil people who think they can change the world?"

"“They were all signs and there would be more, surfacing one by one, floating in front of me like flotsam from a shipwreck. Even when I was drowning I dismissed them all, first with foolishness, then with pride, and finally because I had put out my own eyes with hot pokers of shame.”"

"“Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.”"

"“Homesickness was an adjustment disorder, that was the long and short of it.”"

"What if, by labelling our patients damaged from the outset, we not only condemn them to a self-fulfilling prophecy, but have overlooked a potential finding of equal importance?"

"“He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is what hell must be like. Waiting without knowing. Not hell, but purgatory. Worse than hell.”"

"“If you want to know a country, read its writers.”"

"“All liars ... lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.”"

"“A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.”"

"“The hollowness in his chest, the tense yearning, the loneliness he braces against, every morning until he can immerse himself in work and forget. Not love. Something else, something with a power that endures. Not love, but a memory of love.”"

"“War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.”"

"“When you do nothing, what do your children inherit? They inherit, nothing.”"

"“I learned about women -- how we are made into the women we've become, how we shape ourselves, how we shape each other.”"

"“There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.”"

"“People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school.”"

"“We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.”"

"“He seemed to remember a sense of fearlessness as a child, for lacking the knowledge of death, he supposed, for still believing bad things happened only to other people. How long you held on to that particular belief depended on where you were born.”"

"“What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.”"

"“How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.”"

"“The reckless open their arms and topple into love, as do dreamers, who fly in their dreams without fear or danger. Those who know that all love must end in loss do not fall but rather cross slowly from the not knowing into the knowing.”"

"Love is a gamble, the stake is the human heart. The lover holds his or her cards close, lays them out one at a time and watches each move of the other player."

"To whom do you go first?"

"At the time he had closed in upon himself, denying her a place of entry. She was tenacious, aggressive as a lover, had tried to prise the pieces of him apart. Only when she failed had she finally let go, by then months had passed."

"She loved like she was going to war, but she was also not the kind of woman to wait for a man. Valiant in battle, noble in defeat. She walked away and never looked back."

"“How easily they spoke of love. And yet, when she'd needed the certainty of his feeling for her, he'd let her slip away, never able to bring himself to tell her about the ways in which he'd been changed. He'd been incapable he'd let Nenebah believe the problem lay with her.”"

"Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water."

"It is a sordid tale, all of this, spanning centuries and generations, but we are not doomed by it. We can do better, we have done better, we have done better. But we must do better still. We have to shuck off the last vestiges of the reptilian skin of racism, even if we do not think we are still carrying it around. Because we are. And our failure to shed that skin will continue to poison our politics and shackle the South, and in many ways the rest of the country, with decades of continuing strife and racial injustice. We should strive to be, and we should become, the generation of "grown-ups" who finally, at long last, refuse to put the "hate in children.""

"It is still not easy for us white southerners to come to grips with our collective blindness to these evils, but it seems to me that we must. So, then, how can we understand our inability, our refusal, to see slavery (and later racial segregation) for what it truly was?"

"I have an exercise that I ask the students in my History of the Old South course to undertake toward the end of the semester. It comes after we have spent weeks studying the institution of slavery and the impact of slavery on the society, the politics, the culture, the economy, and the mind of the antebellum South. I ask them to read two letters, two of the most powerful manuscripts I have come across in my archival searches. Their assignment is to go over these two documents very carefully, line by line, analyze their contents, and answer the following question: "Would antebellum white southerners experience guilt over slavery after reading what is written here? Or did they find ways to look the consequences of slavery in the face on a daily basis and experience no guilt over the South's 'peculiar institution'?" I add that historians have debated this question vigorously for decades and have come down on both sides of the guilt question. Their task- my students' task- is to analyze the two primary documents in light of this question. Again, would antebellum white southerners familiar with the content of these two letters have experienced guilt over what is written here? Or would they have done just the opposite and experienced no guilt over what is described? My final comment to them is that there is no way to answer this question definitively, but we can try to understand white southern attitudes during this era and get some idea of how they saw the world in which they lived."

"Charles B. Dew is Ephraim Williams Professor of American History at Williams College and the author of the Fletcher Pratt Award-winning Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secessionist Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (Virginia) and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year."

"Pop's sense of right and wrong was much more of a secular than a religious matter. As a boy, he had been a regular attendee at the Presbyterian Church Sunday school, earning medals for not missing a single class, year after year. But as my mother told the story, his experience as a young teenager selling newspapers at the crack of dawn changed his ideas about organized religion. He had seen church fathers returning from late-night visits to the Negro section of town, and he was old enough to know what they had been up to. Their hypocrisy stuck in his craw and solidified into a hostility toward formal religion that lasted the rest of his life."

"Woodberry Forest School is a stunningly beautiful place located in the rolling Virginia Piedmont just outside the small town of Orange. The campus of imposing red brick and white-columned buildings was surrounded by green athletic fields, a working farm, and a nine-hole golf course, with a magnificent visual backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the western distance. While I was a student there, I roamed the nearby Confederate trenches, leaf-filled but still clearly visible, along the south bank of the Rapidan River, where men from Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had wintered in 1864-1865. The Confederate battle flag that hung in my dorm room during my three years at Woodberry bore witness to my love for the south and a near reverence for the soldiers in grey who manned those trenches on the Rapidan in defense of my native region."

"In some ways, I did a lot of growing up during my time at Woodberry. Mandatory evening study halls, supervised by masters (as we referred to our teachers), were a major irritant and were absolutely vital to my emergence as a decent student who could aspire to making it into a decent college. We read constantly, even over the summer (I thought I would never make it through O.E. Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth), we memorized (I can still recite long passages of "Thanatopsis"), we took tests and exams (all the time, it seemed to me), we had math and lab science courses that drove me crazy, and we competed on those green, frequently muddy, athletic fields all three seasons of every year (football and winter and spring track for me)."

"My ancestors did more than coexist with this institution and draw monetary gain from it. They endorsed it, they embraced it, they celebrated it, they destroyed a hallowed political union to protect it, and they launched what turned out to be the most blood-drenched war in American history to defend it. And with racial segregation, my parents' generation, and my generation, did much the same thing- no secession and civil war this time around, but blood was shed over and over again as the terror of lynching gripped the South in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. And the Jim Crow laws and institutions built by that turn-of-the-century generation, the generation of "Radical racism," were passed down as immutable folkways and endured into my own generation."

"Mutually contradictory creeds can and do keep house together without quarrel within the wide and hospitable Hindu family." "Hindu thought....because of its ingrained conclusiveness, its tolerance, and its indifference to doctrinal divergences, stressed the essential unity of all Indian Dharmas, whether Hindu or Buddhist, and minimized differences."

"Standing on my watch-tower I am commanded, if I see aught of evil coming, to give warning. I solemnly declare that I do discern evil approaching; I see a storm collecting in the heavens; I discover the commotion of the troubled elements; I hear the roar of a distant wind — heaven and earth seem mingled in the conflict — and I cry to those for whom I watch, "A storm! A storm! Get you into the ark or you are swept away. "Oh! what is it I see? I see a world convulsed and falling to ruins — the sea burning like oil — nations rising from under ground — the sun falling — the damned in chains before the bar, and some of my poor hearers among them! I see them cast from the battlements of the judgment scene. My God! the eternal pit has closed upon them forever!"

"I see that I have too much confined my thoughts to God, and that I ought to go directly to the Saviour's arms, and that I ought to believe, abominable as my sins have been, if they have once been pardoned, they form no partition between me and the heart of Christ."

"The cardinal method with faults is to overgrow them and choke them out with virtues."

"The only way to hasten the kingdom is to hasten growth; to hasten work, and that, too, along the very lines in which the "resounding loom of time" is weaving in its various-colored threads."