Obviously input is helpful to faculty in trying to come up with a curriculum, but ultimately it's the faculty's job to know what students need to know. Make a decision about it and present it.

Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation.

We have much wisdom to gain by learning to understand other people's cultures and permitting ourselves to accept that there is more than one version of reality.

If time is a staircase, reality is a Slinky. Decades can be parsed. Television, frequently accused of destabilizing life, is actually what stitches the segments together.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

I don't think the same curriculum fits every student body.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

I don't really usually push an agenda, and I don't feel that my main job is to persuade people of something. My main job is to help them think about something.

There are limits, after all, to the idea of limits.

Literature is being taught as though it were only political medicine or political poison-a view that is not only illiberal but illiterate.

He spoke in a trembling voice that didn’t seem to be entirely in sync with the movement of his lips. That’s because sound travels slower in halitosis.

I once wrestled with an angel. He won, but I learned a few things.

Criticism can be effective when there is something that must be destroyed or dissolved, but it is capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

A happy childhood can't be cured. Mine'll hang around my neck like a rainbow, that's all, instead of a noose.

I don't know how it is up North, of course, but down South there are times when Southern women feel a need for privacy.

Saw the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue, followed him up to the gates of Graceland.

Sometimes I joke around that if I weren't a musician, I would be a power lifter. I don't think people expect it from me because I'm little.

It is a very wonderful experience indeed, when, at fifty years old, you suddenly discover that for the first time in your life, you are really free to be yourself.

I'm going to arrange you, if that's okay?" I swallowed. "Uh... sure." My hands were clutched to my ribcage, my shoulders hunched almost to my ears. What, this isn't how you want me positioned?

Do we soon forget the things we cannot see?