Dr Stein Quotes

What hope, what sense of progress, have we given the next generation if young men of color grow up knowing the odds are they’ll end up in jail or dead before thirty? It’s as though we all need to go back to third grade and remember that poster of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who said, “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

If you can't put your values into your vote, we don't have a democracy.

If women deserve equality around the world, then a feminist cannot also be an imperialist and warmonger.

Every week Dr. Stein asked, “What do you see out the window?” Her stylus was never on camera, but Nedda could hear it sliding across a tablet. It was difficult to explain what she saw, harder still to parse its meaning. Space between stars made for easy misery, contemplating how small you were when faced with the universe. Though he was mission commander, Amit Singh looked out as little as possible, preferring star maps, feeds from the telescopes, and data from the probes and terraformers. He remained intent on viewing himself as a person and not a single cell in an organism the size of the universe. Nedda liked feeling small. “Endless space is endless potential,” she’d told Dr. Stein. It was good to sound hopeful. It was trickier to explain that she was looking for light, picking it apart, trying to sense the different wavelengths, searching for the familiar. There was light in the black, on its way to and from distant planets, light from stars crashing into one another, meeting in the space between. Light carried thoughts and hopes, the essence of what made everyone.

Outside, the wind was growing louder—now the trees beyond the window, like mourners, bent beneath the fury of the storm, and against the window, tracks of rain spilled sideways like lead. Dr. Stein walked to the window and pushed it up, old wood creaking and water blowing in onto his skin, cold. The darkness held only shadows but still he stared into it. He leaned his head out further, gripping tightly to the sill and pulling in. When he closed the window, the sudden barrier was jarring; he ran his fingers through his wet hair once and watched the rainbow sides of droplets falling.

Specifically, the Palestinians fell into old and predictable routines. Dr. Kenneth Stein, Emory University professor of Middle Eastern studies, pointed out in a landmark 1990 study that a number of remarkable similarities existed among the Palestinians during first two uprisings: selfdestructive violence, Islamic militancy, rejection of the West, and internal Palestinian rivalries among political leaders over strategy and tactics.

can’t run scared and succeed in show business.”13 Dr. Jules Stein lived by this motto and taught his people to follow this and two other sayings: “Watch the pennies, and the dollars will take of themselves,” and “when you start a business, do whatever it takes to be second to no one.

She thinks about that now. Is grief the price? Why does love have to be so costly? The benefits she has reaped from this love, have they been enough? When she had just Daisy toddling around, an older woman had said to her, “I think by the time they’re two, kids have repaid their parents for everything. They give us so much joy in just those first two years of their life. All the worrying and misery that might come after is just paying the piper.” Margaret, then a frizzled first-time mom, wondered what the woman was talking about. But now she thinks she knows. She’s had these moments, a nestling child in her arms, a kiss and a deep inhale of the heady sent of a sleeping baby, a laugh of pure joy shared with her husband at something funny that has been said by an unknowing innocent – she has had so, so many of these moments. Her life has been rich with those moments. She is grateful for them. She wants to remember and honor them. This is such a moment, she realizes. Sitting here, on the beach, with the warm sand beneath and the bright sun above, with Clarke and two of her children present, she feels something like a brief moment of contentment. You don’t win anything for being the saddest the longest, Dr. Stein has said. There’s no prize for being the most miserable. You are not betraying anyone by trying to live a better life. You are not giving up on anyone. I’m not telling you to be happy. I’m telling you that it’s okay to have moments when you’re not sad. You can laugh, maybe once a month, maybe twice. It’s okay. Here’s the thing. You think only one specific event, one miracle, will make things better, but actually life will get better if you only let it. You have to let life get better. You have to for your family’s sake, and for your sake. You don’t think your happiness matters, but it does. It matters for your family. They can’t be happy unless you see that you have the ability to be. Time will help. It can be agonizingly slow, but it always does. Forward. Onward. Those are the directions she has to follow. Remember this moment, she thinks fiercely. Hold onto it. - The Expatriates

He thought of Dr. Stein again. What was Stein’s favorite line? “Understanding is a delaying tactic.” Stein used to get angry about that. When the graduate students would intellectualize, going on and on about patients and their problems, he would interrupt in annoyance, “Who cares? Who cares whether we understand the psychodynamics in this case? Do you want to understand how to swim, or do you want to jump in and start swimming? Only people who are afraid of the water want to understand it. Other people jump in and get wet.

Life was a journey not a destination. We would always be a work in progress. Dr. Stein told me that.

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at USC. His most recent books include Dr. No (finalist for the NBCC Award for Fiction and winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction), Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), So Much Blue, Erasure, and I Am Not Sidney Poitier.