Grad Quotes

I was hugely impressed... was the ultimate example of a man who knew what he didn't know, was perfectly willing to admit it, and didn't want to leave until he understood. That's heroic to me. I wish every grad student had that attitude.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Literature could turn you into an asshole: he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

Oh nookie in the stacks.Figures you're the type to have that fantasy, grad school and all.

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.

But I dog sit for those people. Once they notice he’s gone, they will ask me if I’ve seen him.” “So what?” “I pride myself in being an honest man. That’s what!

Da… Vreme je i bilo, lutko… Upoznao sam ovaj grad tragajući za ulicom kojom prolaziš…

There is more to Subject C than meets the eye. I am baffled by the coldness and selfishness of this woman. I am also tired of dog sitting. Hiding in shadows, waiting in the wings to talk with her is not my style. I hope I'm not in over my head.

Only a four-hundred-year-old vampire would wonder if a grad student could understand procrastination.

It reminds me of grad school, when we couldn’t afford therapy and we’d engage in some healthy communal bitching every other night, just to survive the madness.

What kind of grad student do you take? “I never take a straight A student. A real scientist tends to be critical, and somewhere along the line, they had to rebel against their teachers.

She sighed. “You know, when I have no more friends and everyone hates me because of this fake-dating thing, I’ll be super lonely and you are going to have to hang out with me every day. I’ll annoy you all the time. Is it really worth being mean to every grad in the program?” “Absolutely.

PESMA ZA NAS DVOJE Znam, mora biti da je tako: nikad se nismo sreli nas dvoje, mada se trazimo podjednako zbog srece njene i srece moje. Pijana kisa siba i mlati, vrbama vetar cupa kosu. Kuda cu? U koji grad da svratim? Dan je niz mutna polja prosut. Vucaram svetom dva prazna oka zurim u lica prolaznika. Koga da pitam,gladan i mokar, zasto se nismo sreli nikad? Il je vec bilo? Trebao korak? Mozda je sasvim do mene dosla. Al' ja, u krcmu svratio gorak, a ona ne znajuci-prosla. Ne znam. Ceo svet smo obisli u zudnji ludoj podjednakoj, a za korak se mimoisli. Da,mora da je tako.

I don't want to wait anymore. I choose to believe that there is nothing more sacred or profound than this day.I choose to believe that there may be a thousand big moments embedded in this day, waiting to be discovered like tiny shards of gold. The big moments are the daily, tiny moments of courage and forgiveness and hope that we grad onto and extend to one another. That's the drama of life, swirling all around us, and generally I don't see it, because I'm too busy waiting to become whatever it is I think I'm about to become. The big moments are in every hour, every conversation, every meal, every meeting.

The combination to be on guard for is young and bored, or young and resentful. You can spot them at social gatherings, the grad students or interns who tell you about syndromes, conditions, deviances, and disorders, and they love, love, love to talk. They speak in half-sentences with a knowing smile-squint, watch you falter at the pause, and then keep talking.

Back in business grad school at USC when I was a student, I took the Briggs Meyers test. I took the test again at my first job. Both time it tested the same: That I have the personality of a CEO and an Inventor. Guess it was pretty accurate. - Kailin Gow on Briggs Meyers Tests

And one of the hidden secrets of science, passed down from a few rare teachers to their grad students, is how to avoid flushing new ideas down the toilet the instant you hear one you don't like.

Everyone spends nights on the floor of their closet during grad school.

I cast my mind back, to before grad school, before undergrad even, all the way to the first moment I remember loving a story. Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I'd never been

Grad school was a mistake, but now it's too late to back out of it because my self-worth is unbreakably tied to my academic performance, and what would even be left of me if I decide to drop out?

The lesson of the Funk Dog: “You can forget what it used to feel like to feel good about life; feeling rotten—or just a low-grad funk—seems normal and therefore acceptable. I just don’t believe that God intended for any of his creatures to be petted with sticks.

The stress of grad school can drive anyone temporarily mad.

That's my school. I worked harder to get in than I did for anything else, ever. I went there because, coming out of it, I'd be able to be President. Or a lawyer. Rich, that's the point. Rich and successful. And look where it got me. One stupid year and here I am with not one, but two bracelets on my wrist, next to a shrink in a room adjacent to a hall where there's a guy named Human Being walking around. If I keep doing this for three more years, where will I be? I'll be a complete loser. And what If I keep on? What if I do okay, live with the depression, get into College, do College, go to Grad School, get the Job, get the Money, get Kids and a Wife and a Nice Car? What kind of crap will I be in then? I'll be completely crazy.

What about this? A colony of nothing but Battle School grads. If they bred true, they'd be the smartest military minds in the galaxy. Then they'd come home and take over Earth. OK, not that.

By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song.

I laughed when she said “utilize” and she said “what?” and I said “just utilize, it’s a meaningless word” and then she tried to tell me that it “communicated” something different from the word “use” and the way she looked at me, chuckling, glancing over at James like “oh, how sweet, it tried to talk,” made me so mad that I might have said, maybe, something along the lines of “yeah, it communicates something, it’s a real first-gen-college-grad kind of word, like your parents are small-town conservative Christians who didn’t have any books in the house, and you’re self-conscious about your upbringing so you want to stand out by using elitist intellectual language, but you don’t actually know any long words, so you just truss up the word ‘use’ for no fucking reason other than to try to make people feel like you’re the one with the big mental dick, even though ‘utilize’ is basically just administrative jargon and completely déclassé to them that knows.

Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I’m clever"—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.

Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grad, they're well and truly gone -- they're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks! In the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than "dutiful daughter" is "looking good"; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now.

Genealogists: they're just grad students without the Pell Grant funding or a degree waiting for them at the end.

Stakleni grad – jesam li ga osjetio? Jesam li ga našao? Kuda me to vodi život? Svatko ima svoj Stakleni grad, svaka osoba, svaka nacija, svaka ideologija, religija. … Tražiti Stakleni grad značilo je tražiti svoj ideal, tražiti sebe.

She would have loved to have someone in her life, but she doubted it was in store for her. Maybe she was unlovable. Maybe spending so many years alone had warped her in some fundamental way and that was why she seemed to be unable to develop a true romantic connection, or even the type of attraction she often heard others talk about. In the end, it didn’t really matter. Grad school and dating went poorly together, anyway, which was probably why Dr. Adam Carlsen, MacArthur Fellow and genius extraordinaire, was standing here at thirtysomething years old, asking Olive what people did on dates. Academics, ladies and gentlemen.

Before I grad her book and mine, I go sit next to her on the organ bench and she gives me a big grandma hug - her special version, made from strong arms, old-fashioned perfume, and years of practice. The kind that makes you think you've won the best prize in the world. For love and safety, find your grandma. (76)

Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It's like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions.

Ja ne biram ono što imam. Ne biram ustvari ništa, ni rođenje, ni porodicu, ni ime, ni grad, ni kraj, ni narod, sve mi je nametnuto. Još je čudnije što to moranje pretvaram u ljubav. Jer, nešto mora biti moje, zato što je sve tuđe, i prisvajam ulicu, grad, kraj, nebo koje gledam nad sobom od detinjstva. Zbog straha od praznine, od svijeta bez mene. Ja ga otimam, ja mu se namećem, a mojoj ulici je svejedno, i nebu nadamnom je svejedno, ali neću da znam za to svejedno, dajem im svoje osjećanje, udahnjujem im svoju ljubav, da mi je vrate

Gesunder Menschenverstand kann fast jeden Grad von Bildung ersetzen, aber kein Grad von Bildung den gesunden Menschenverstand.

I am fairly certain that I was the first Seven Sisters grad to eat duck liver chased with a Diet Coke in the lobby of a federal penitentiary. Then again, you never know.

Ich fürchte, grad unter Menschen möchtest du ein Mensch zu sein verlernen.

When I interviewed at Yale, the admissions committee asked me why they should let me into the program. I looked at them unblinking and said, 'Because I'm going to change the world some day. And I'm giving you the chance to say, We knew her when.

…I’d let those entering (grad) students in on my secret—higher education is all about perseverance. It has nothing to do with smarts or creativity or anything else. It’s about cultivating the willingness and stamina for hoop jumping. Jump through the hoops, I’d say. Do it well. Do it relentlessly. And in a few years you can join the elite of the American education system secure in the knowledge that you too can endure with the best of them.

At the college where I teach, I'm surrounded by circus people. We aren't tightrope walkers or acrobats. We don't breathe fire or swallow swords. We're gypsies, moving wherever there's work to be found. Our scrapbooks and photo albums bear witness to our vagabond lives: college years, grad-school years, instructor-mill years, first-job years. In between each stage is a picture of old friends helping to fill a truck with boxes and furniture. We pitch our tents, and that place becomes home for a while. We make families from colleagues and students, lovers and neighbors. And when that place is no longer working, we don't just make do. We move on to the place that's next. No place is home. Every place is home. Home is our stuff. As much as I love the Cumberland Valley at twilight, I probably won't live there forever, and this doesn't really scare me. That's how I know I'm circus people.

Imi stia punctele slabe si hibele, imi cunostea pana in cel mai inalt grad paralizia morala- totala mea lipsa de incredere- care punea stapanire pe mine in momentele de mare intensitate emotionala.

Top academic institutions are wonderful, but there are unrecognized benefits to not coming out of one. Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul-crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there and

Is it the public-speaking thing?" He'd remembered. Of course he had. "Yeah. It will be awful." Adam stared at her and said nothing. Not that it would be fine, not that the talk would go smoothly, not that she was overreacting and underselling a fantastic opportunity. His calm acceptance of her anxiety had the exact opposite effect of Dr. Aslan's enthusiasm: it relaxed her. "When I was in my third year of grad school," he said quietly, “my adviser sent me to give a faculty symposium in his stead. He told me only two days before, without any slides or a script. Just the title of the talk." "Wow." Olive tried to imagine what that would have felt like,

Po danu Lisabon ima nečeg naivno teatralnog što privlači i očarava — ali je noću grad iz bajke koji se sa blistavo osvijetljenim terasama spušta ka moru, kao neka nagizdana žena što se naginje ka svom tamnoplavom ljubavniku.

Frankly, Olive was a bit on the fence about this whole grad school thing. Not because she didn’t like science. (She did. She loved science. Science was her thing.) And not because of the truckload of obvious red flags. She was well aware that committing to years of unappreciated, underpaid eighty-hour workweeks might not be good for her mental health. That nights spent toiling away in front of a Bunsen burner to uncover a trivial slice of knowledge might not be the key to happiness. That devoting her mind and body to academic pursuits with only infrequent breaks to steal unattended bagels might not be a wise choice. She was well aware, and yet none of it worried her.

Za Sarajevo kažu da je grad u kojem se sukobljavaju civilizacije. Mislim da to nije tačno jer civilizacija u ovaj grad, kao uostalom ni u jedan grad u Jugoslaviji još uvijek nije došla. U Sarajevu se sukobljavaju samo odjeci zapadne i istočne civilizacije.

In fact, in the United States, only 27 percent of college grads end up in a career related to their majors.

Grad school really screwed us up, didn’t it?

Sa jednom kartom mogu da se vozim ukrug, ali nikad neću moći da izađem napolje. Svejedno je, grad je isti i dole i gore.

Nije da mi je grad svejedan, ali je podjednak. Debelo crevo se ne razlikuje od ženskih trepavica.

Prin angoasa în fața morții experimentăm autenticitatea în cel mai înalt grad.

Nekada davno, neki trgovac saznao od vracare da ce umreti na pun mesec kad sledeci put bude otisao da trguje u Damask. Uplasen, covek je odlozio svoj put u Damask i ostao kod kuce. Prodje pun mesec i on ugleda Smrt kako ide prema njemu. Uplasi se, zajase najbrzeg konja i pobegne u susedni grad. I tamo umalo da naleti na Smrt. Nemase kud nego da se sakrije jos dalje. Putovao je nedeljama preko pustinja i planina, sve do Bagdada. Konj mu izdahne pod njim od iscrpljenosti , kad eto ti opet Smrti. Trgovcu vise dojadilo da bezi i da se skriva pa joj pridje i upita je: "Zasto me stalno pratis?" A smrt mu odgovori: "Da te pitam zasto nisi dosao u Damask

But I also instantly recognized this response as my conditioning from grad school, where these things were trained out of me, where I was reprogrammed in a way that actually took away my power while purporting to give me access to power--power that, through my voice, I'd already had.

What makes America unique is not that it built MIT, or that its grads are generating economic growth and innovation, but that every state in the country has universities trying to do the same. “America has 4,000 colleges and universities,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. “The rest of the world combined has 7,768 institutions of higher education.

At other times, he wondered whether it was the world that had lost its color, or his friends themselves. When had everyone become so alike? Too often, it seemed that the last time people were so interesting had been college; grad school...What had happened? Age, he guessed. And with it: Jobs. Money. Children. The things to forestall death, the things to ensure one's relevance, the things to comfort and provide context and content. The march forward, one dictated by biology and convention, that not even the most irreverent mind could withstand. But those were his peers. What he really wanted to know was when his friends had become so conventional, and why he hadn't noticed earlier.

Strah je došao u hladnim tonovima sivkasto plave, poput magle što se nadvila nad grad. Bio je duljine otkucaja srca; taman dovoljno da joj se cijeli svijet preokrene još jednom, a zatim da posluša njegove riječi.

Kad sam je drugi put video rekao sam: "Eno Moje Poezije kako prelazi ulicu." Obećala je da će doći ako bude lepo vreme. Brinuo sam o vremenu, pisao svim meteorološkim stanicama. Svim poštarima svim pesnicima a naročito sebi. Da se kiše zadrže u zabačenim krajevima. Bojao sam se da preko noći ne izbije rat, Jer na svašta su spremni oni koji hoće da ometu naš sastanak Sastanak na koji već kasni čitavu moju mladost. Te noći sam nekoliko vekova strepeo za tu ženu Tu ženu sa dve senke, Od kojih je jedna mračnija i nosi moje ime. Sad se čitav grad okreće za Mojom Poezijom Koju sam davno sreo na ulici i pitao: "Gospodjice osećam se kao stvar koju ste izgubili Da nisam možda ispao iz vaše tašne?" Ja sam njen lični pesnik kao što ona ima i lične ljubavnike. Volim je više no što mogu da izdržim, Više od mojih raširenih ruku, Mojih ljubavnih ruku punih žara punih magneta i ludila. Moj snu, kao asfalt izbušen njenim štiklama, Noći, za mene sve duža bačena izmedju nas, Ona mi celu krv nesrećnom ljubavlju zamenjuje. Moje su uši pune njenog karmina, Te providne te hladne uši to slatko u njima Kad se kao prozori zamagle od njenog daha. Kako je ona putovala pomerao se i centar sveta. Pomerala se njena soba koja ne izlazi iz moje glave Sumo vremena, sumo ničega, ljubavna sumo, Još ne prestaje da me boli uvo Koje mi je pre rodjenja otkinuo Van Gog To uvo što krvari putujući u ljubavnim kovertama. U staklenu zoru palu u prašinu, Plivao sam što dalje ka pustim mestima da bih slobodno jaukao. Ptico nataložena u grudima što ti ponestaje vazduha, Radnice popodne na tudjem balkonu, Već dvadeset godina moj pokojni otac ne popravlja telefon, Već dvadeset godina on je mrtav bez ikakvih isprava. O koliko ćemo užasno biti razdvojeni i paralelni, O koliko ćemo biti sami u svojim grobovima. Još oko nje oblećem kao noćni leptir oko sveće I visoke prozore spuštam pred njene noge. Moje srce me drži u zatvoru i vodi pred njenu kuću Gde su spuštene zavese nad mojom ljubavlju. Ta žena puna malih časovnika sa očima u mojoj glavi, Taj andjeo, isprljan suncem list vode, list vazduha, Ljubomorne zveri oru zemlju i same se zakopavaju. O sunce nadjeno medju otpacima... Zuje uporednici kao telegrafske žice, Prevrću se golubovi kao beli plakati u vazduhu, I mrtve ih krila godinama zadržavaju u visinama Kao što mene njena obećanja održavaju u životu. O siroče u srcu što ti brišem suze Moja nesrećna ljubavi razmeno djubreta Stidim se dok je ljubim kao da sam sve to izmislio. Kuća, ništavilo na svim prozorima, Sve je dignuto u vazduh. Samo se još nesrećni pesnici kurvinski bave nadom.

After finishing grad school, the Little Mermaid started a nonprofit to fight for the rights of mercitizens. She decided at that moment that she would never measure her success by financial gain, but instead only by how much good she contributed to the world. Money was irrelevant to her. Later that day she got her first student loan bill.

beskonačno kao kad grad posrne pa se nagnu razine tekućina u prijepodnevnim šalicama i umornom tijelu s kojeg otpadaju imena na ulici u mnoštvu trgovina naš je susret potrošen mi ne vrijedimo jer smo moderniji od benzina na kojeg se voze bogovi u otvorenim automobilima dugačkom cestom njenim mokrim širokim leđima na tvojem sam pupku spojio palčeve a onda je zasjalo sunce i ja sam izgubio kosu pa sam te volio i opet bio moderan na putu do lunaparka što blista u mom dalekom oku dok je nebo sivo dok je otok miran dobrim velikim dlanom razmazujem sol po tvom čelu

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!

Life is funny. I'd applied to the wrong graduate program, but that eventually led me to the right grad program. I'd taken what I thought was the wrong undergraduate major, and that was the thing that set me apart and allowed me to find my niche. I don't know if there are any lessons to take from that except to realize that the things you think are mistakes may turn out not to be mistakes. I realized wherever you are, if you make the most of what you've got, you can find a way to keep moving forward.

This was in [Orwell's] 1946 'Politics and the English Language,' an essay that despite its date (and its title's basic redundancy) remains the definitive SNOOT statement on Academese. Orwell's famous AE translation of the gorgeous 'I saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift' in Ecclesiastes as 'Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account' should be tattooed on the left wrist of every grad student in the anglophone world.

Do I hate him? No. Yes. No. I haven’t forgotten how much of a dipshit he was in grad school, or that he reprimanded me about my clothes on my first day of work, or any of the dickish things he’s done to me. But after a big day like today, when he saved me from total, catastrophic implosion, it all seems so distant. No, then. I don’t hate him. In fact, I kind of like him. But I don’t want to admit it,

Sjećam se: polazio sam "na škole". Mati je grcala ispraćajući me: - Pripazi, sinko, grad je dušmanin. Ne idi sredinom đade, satraće te štagod, ama nemoj ni plaho uz kraj - da te, boj se, ne udari nešta s krova, nego hajde 'nako, 'nako... Dalje nije znala. Ili nije mogla?...

Jag vill lära mig att skilja minnet från smärtan. Eller åtminstone delvis, så mycket det är möjligt, för att allt som varit inte ska vara till den grad indränkt i smärta. Då ska jag kunna komma ihåg dig mer, du förstår: jag ska inte frukta varje gång minnets brinnande smärta.

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side. It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End.’ Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.

Vesnica problema: cea a nivelului spiritual.Daca nu te afli la acelasi nivel cu cineva,nu te poti intelege cu el.Nivelul spiritual se masoara prin gradul de instrainare fata de lume.Dar cum sa stabilesti in chip obiectiv acest grad? Atunci cand vorbesc cu cineva,stiu la ce sa ma astept din partea lui,stiu pana unde pot merge cu el.El insa nu stie. Crede ca ma intelege.Si poate ca ma intelege in felul lui. Caci nimic nu spune ca,intr-un anumit domeniu,n-a mers mult mai departe decat mine.Cu toate astea,de experienta spirituala e capabil doar acela pentru care conteaza din ce in ce mai putine lucruri,pentru care cercul intereselor se restrange pe masura ce merge inainte. Important nu este sa stii,ci sa fii.Or,a fi este isprava cea mai dificila cu putinta.Caci a fi,pe plan spiritual,inseamna sa nu fii nimic pe planul lumii.

I thought about what I wanted to do now -- if I wanted to eat or leave the park, if I wanted to apply to grad school in the fall, if I wanted to find Ben in the crowd. Nothing sounded appealing, and I had the vague desire to slip through the cracks of what everyone else was doing.

There’s a popular, potent story right now that says success is a straight line from the right school to the right college to the right internship to the right grad school to your chosen profession.” “Raise your hand if this is the path that you took.” About 5 percent of the hands went up. “That’s right,” she said. “In any group of people only 1–10 percent have taken a straight trajectory. The much more common route is circuitous.

Hey, Meg," she said without preamble. I need you to write a letter of recommendation for me. I'm applying for grad school." Meghann screamed into the phone. "Oh, my God! I'm so proud of you. I'm hanging up now; I have to draft a letter that makes my best friend sound like da Vinci in a bra and panties.

I cast my mind back, to before grad school, before undergrad even all the way to the first moment I remember loving a story. Feeling like I was living it. Being, even as a child, bowled over by how something imaginary could become real, could wring every emotion from me or make me homesick for places I'd never been.

For a community to grow to a size that sustains those who don’t contribute to the growth of said community (whom I call leeches but society has chosen to call grad students), you need an immensely powerful creature to build a structure that allows those loafers to exist. But even a whale can only support so many parasites.

Damn right, I'm afraid. People who don't acknowledge danger will die very quickly.

Lasst uns nehmen, was wir kriegen können, und einfach gehen, wenn es nicht genug ist. Liebe oder Verachtung. So einfach.

Pentru ce oamenii care suferă nu se plictisesc? În scara stărilor negative, care începe de la plictiseală şi sfârşeşte în disperare, trecând prin melancolie şi tristeţe, omul care suferă încearcă atât de rar plictiseala, încât pentru el prima treaptă este melancolia. Plictiseala o cunosc numai oamenii care n-au un conţinut lăuntric mai adânc şi care nu se pot menţine vii decât prin stimulente exterioare. Toate nulităţile caută varietatea lumii din afară, fiindcă superficialitatea nu este altceva decât realizarea prin obiecte. Omul superficial n-are decât o problemă: salvarea prin obiect. De aceea, el caută în lumea din afară tot ceea ce aceasta îi poate oferi pentru a se putea umple pe sine însuşi cu valori şi lucruri exterioare. Melancolia presupune o dilatare lăuntrică, un vag al depărtărilor şi o nostalgie a infinitului, care izvorăsc dintr-o înălţime şi un rafinament sufletesc ce nu le întâlnim niciodată în plictiseală. Dacă omul superficial îşi pune vreodată probleme de ordin metafizic, atunci substratul psihic din care izvorăşte această nelinişte aproximativă nu se ridică niciodată deasupra plictiselii. Şi toată metafizica la care duce plictiseala nu este decât o metafizică de circumstanţă. În plictiseală, niciodată nu se pune serios problema omului, sau cel puţin a subiectului, ci numai a orientării şi a atitudinii imediate faţă de lumea din afară. Nu este nici măcar o chestiune de dispoziţie; de destin, nici vorbă. Plictiseala este întâiul semn de nelinişte când omul nu este inconştient, prin plictiseală animalul îşi manifestă primul grad de omenie. Ce departe de toate acestea este omul care suferă! Acesta niciodată nu e atât de sărac încât să se poată plictisi. Suferinţa are rezerve infinite, care niciodată nu lasă pe om prea singur, ca el să mai aibă nevoie de alţii.

Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.

JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers -- he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money -- and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.

I felt I would live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed (did I mention that I never bothered filling out any grad-school applications?) It’s self-indulgent, I know, but this is what happens to the overachieving but essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well on tests but failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition.

A: Is this the copy that you read as a kid? E: Yes. Look at the edges--that turquoise color. It's lighter along the top, from where the sun hit it. Now look at this gorgeous color here, the long edge. Beautiful. Makes me nostalgic. A: For what? E: I don't know. The age of turquoise page edges. Somewhere there's a grad student doing her dissertation on the inks used in twentieth-century mass-market paperbacks.

Most fundamentally, I used to write because I received positive feedback. To a guy who was picked on pretty relentlessly through a lot of his childhood, the respect and affection of students and teachers is addictive. It was a couple years after grad school that I realized that a need for affirmation wasn’t a good enough reason to keep writing, especially in the face of rejection after rejection after even personal rejection, and that if I was going to do it, I had to acknowledge that it was going to take my whole life. The decision to do it until I’m dead has made the writing and the writing life so much easier.

The universities are an absolute wreck right now, because for decades, any graduate student in the humanities who had independent thinking was driven out. There was no way to survive without memorizing all these stupid bromides with this referential bowing to these over-inflated figures like Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and so on. Basically, it's been a tyranny in the humanities, because the professors who are now my age – who are the baby boomer professors, who made their careers on the back of Foucault and so on – are determined that that survive. So you have a kind of vampirism going on. So I've been getting letters for 25 years since Sexual Personae was released in 1990, from refugees from the graduate schools. It's been a terrible loss. One of my favorite letters was early on: a woman wrote to me, she was painting houses in St. Louis, she said that she had wanted a career as a literature professor and had gone into the graduate program in comparative literature at Berkeley. And finally, she was forced to drop out because, she said, every time she would express enthusiasm for a work they were studying in the seminar, everyone would look at her as if she had in some way created a terrible error of taste. I thought, 'Oh my God', see that's what's been going on – a pretentious style of superiority to the text. [When asked what can change this]: Rebellion! Rebellion by the grad students. This is what I'm trying to foment. We absolutely need someone to stand up and start criticizing authority figures. But no; this generation of young people have been trained throughout middle school and high school and college to be subservient to authority.

It's a blue collar thing... Middle-class kids are groomed to fly away, and they do. The working class likes to keep its young close to home. Tearing a working class person from the network that defines their life is a far heavier lift than insisting that a Harvard grad move to Silicon Valley. The professional elite values change and self-development; working-class families value stability and community. The professional elite associate change with challenge, excitement, opportunity, and innovation. But for families, a few paychecks away form losing their homes and stable middle-class lives, respect for stability reigns supreme.

A Belgian journalist, struggling to describe the scene, had said that it resembled a cross between a permanent mass wake, an ongoing grad night for at least a dozen subcultures unheard of before the disaster, the black market cafes of occupied Paris, and Goya's idea of a dance party (assuming Goya had been Japanese and smoked freebase methamphetamine, which along with endless quantities of alcohol was clearly the Western World's substance of choice). It was, the Belgian said, as though the city, in its convolsion and grief, had spontaneously and necessarily generated this hidden pocket universe of the soul, its few unbroken windows painted over with black rubber aquarium paint. There would be no view of the ruptured city. As the reconstruction began around it, it had already become a benchmark in Tokyo's psychic history, an open secret, an urban legend.

Who's cooking your food anyway? What strange beasts lurk behind the kitchen doors? You see the chef: he's the guy without the hat, with the clipboard under his arm, maybe his name stitched in Tuscan blue on his starched white chef's coat next to those cotton Chinese buttons. But who's actually cooking your food? Are they young, ambitious culinary school grads, putting in their time on the line until they get their shot at the Big Job? Probably not. If the chef is anything like me, the cooks are a dysfunctional, mercenary lot, fringe-dwellers motivated by money, the peculiar lifestyle of cooking and grim pride. They're probably not even American.

I'll bite: Hard science TA's and RA's often repair equipment; it's part of our science. If you want a silver spoon, don't go to grad school. Science is all about dangerous chemicals, semi-safe experimental equipment, and 4am drives down gravel roads in old vans with a nice steep drop on one side. Guardrail? Ho ho ho. Fixing the computers is just the tip of the iceberg. Plus, where else could you get on-the-job experience with a PDP-8?

Though everyone had been uniformly gracious with me throughout our visit, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being vetted in some way and that I’d already come up short. Peter was the one they wanted; I was merely the collateral—the boyfriend, the grad-school widow. I was accustomed to monopolizing Peter’s affection, but for the first time in our relationship, I felt like I’d arrived at a meeting only to find all the seats at the table filled.

Women, the most beautiful things in the world,” answers the model. As if it’s the only thing worth painting, as if everyone should aspire to it. Normally coming from a guy that answer would sound so incredibly skeezy—a greasy, obvious pick-up line. But something about this guy’s earnest tone tells me he means it." -from Model Position by Kitsy Clare

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience--think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter--poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure--all that matters about poetry to me is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit'ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nusing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I'd be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end.

I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with the leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water 100 years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.

I wasn’t sure whether he was a grad student, poet, actor, stripper, or brilliant combination of all those things. But the man knew Lord Byron, and he knew words. He knew the rise and fall of sentences, the way to pause, the moment to look up, catch our gazes, smile. He knew emphasis and speed, pacing and clarity. He was a prince of poetry, and he had us mesmerized. Champagne was uncorked and dunked into gleaming silver chalices of ice, then poured into tall, thin glasses while we listened, legs crossed and perched forward in our chairs. “Is it better if we’re objectifying his body and his brain?” Margot asked, lifting the thin straw in her gin and tonic for a sip. “I don’t much care,” Mallory said. “He gives good word.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Razumem ja to, da Beograd mora da stigne evropske prestonice. Ali, ne može se nikada vek preskakati godinom. Ne može se pet godina stavljati uz pet vekova. Moraju tu proći decenije. Najmanje možemo vekove određivati spratovima. Žurba je veliki saveznik kajanja. Ne smemo dozvoliti da naši graditelji mrze svoj grad. Baš zato što ide iza drugih gradova, Beograd ne sme da ponavlja njihove greške. Mora se prostor prvo navići na čoveka. Ne može se, tek tako, izaći na ledinu i podići tek tako deo grada. Ako pristanem na haos, haos će zavladati mnome.

But I am scared. Everybody's scared." "You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas. "You see where I'm going with this?' "Well, yeah." "I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.

Dame i gospodo, drugovi i drugarice, dragi gosti, imam naročito zadovoljstvo da večeras otvorim izložbu dela naše drage Anči. Naša mlada umetnica uvrštena je već u najvažnije stručne publikacije. Iza nje stoji obimna bibliografija, a njeno ime danas se može pronaći ne samo u Telefonskom imeniku za grad Beograd i za čitavu Jugoslaviju već i u ekskluzivnom spisku stanara i nekim drugim značajnim publikacijama, kao što su Školski dnevnik ili Spisak dobrovljnih davalaca krvi. Do sada se pojavljivala na svim značajnijim i važnijim kolektivnim nastupima na časovima crtanja u svojoj školi, dok se neka od njenih dela, redjenih kredom i zgrafitom, izvedenih tehnikom grebanja, još uvek nalaze na nekoliko zgrada u najprometnijim ulicama našeg glavnog grada. Izdvojimo samo neke poznatije kompozicije: „Mišo čekaj me u pola osam na starom mestu. Ana je budala“ (kolektino delo njenih suparnica – Knez Mihailova 10, levi zid), „Budala je onaj ko je pisao“ (ista lokacija, Anin odgovor na napad), etc, etc... Drage dame, gospodo i dragi gosti, dopustite mi da ovu najotvoreniju izložbu u gradu proglasim otvorenom, a da istovreeno svoje buduće kritičare zatvorim (u ludnicu)!

Durerea, îşi dă seama Max, atinge mai devreme sau mai târziu un grad de saturaţie, după care intensitatea nu mai are importanţă. De la un anumit punct încolo, nu mai contează dacă sunt douăzeci sau patruzeci de lovituri. Şi de-atunci nu mai doare fiecare nouă lovitură, ci pauza dintre una şi cealaltă. Deoarece chinul cel mai greu de suportat nu îl reprezintă bătaia, ci momentele când călăul se întrerupe ca să-şi tragă sufletul. Atunci carnea îndurerată, care amorţeşte când e supusă violenţei, se relaxează şi simte cu adevărat durerea care o torturează. Rezultatul întregului proces anterior.

Jutro je, međutim, u Rimu, vanredno. Sunčani zraci padaju ukoso, a blago, kao mesečina, koja se žuti i koja je topla, a ti zraci prodiru u grudi, kao neke prijatne strele. To je jedino sunce koje sija i bogatašu i siromahu, i maldom čoveku, i bolesniku, i starcu. Sunce i Rim stapaju se u sećanju, u jedno. Nigde u Evropi Sunce ne sija tako. Ni na jedni glavni grad zemalja. Niti igde fontane hlade tako lepo. Sam taj fakt, koji se ponavlja - ujutro, u Rimu - pretvara se u duboku ljudsku sreću, a svi u Rimu učestvujemo u tom baletu, koji nosi naslov: Il Giorno. Dan. Možda je to jutro, U Rimu, taj mir, kojim počinje dan, zato tako vedro, jer nas čeka pritajena žalost smrti, u večeru, u Rimu, koji je najveća grobnica na svetu. To samo u Italiji ide zajedno. Samo se u Italiji, u Rimu, život i smrt, tako mešaju.

I grabed one of his hands that was hanging loosely at his side.I took a little bit of work to pry the fat silver ring off his finger, but when I had it free I held it up between the two of us and looked him dead in the eye. He was watching me caustiously, but didn't ask me what I was doing. Do you love me Jet? Dispite it all. Do you love me? Aden I'm here of course I love you. I love you before, I love you after, and I'll love you for everything in between. Had we not been in a grungy motel room in Kentucky,there was a good chance I would have gotten down on one kneeto make the moment more dramatic, to prove to him just how serious I was about not running away anymore but a girl had to have standards. I grad his left hand and put a kiss in his left palm. Jet Keller I love you and there is no future for me without you in it. I'm never going to bed with a man that isn't you again. I don't care if you're a rock star or a a car salesman.I just want there to be a you and me forever. Will you marry me?

El secreto del amor es cuestion de gustos: Uno no puede amar a una persona que no le gusta y eso significa que te guste lo que la otra persona es en realidad y no lo que quieres o necesitas que él o ella sean. Otra parte de este secreto es confiar, compartir y ser los mejores amigos. De hecho el amor verdadero significa libertad y crecimiento antes que posesión y limitaciones. Es sinónimo de paz y no de confusión, también de seguridad en vez de miedo, entendimiento, lealtad, estímulo, compromiso, conexión y lo más importante es el respeto. Porque cuando uno no es tratado con respeto, aparece el dolor y nadie lo puede evitar, un dolor profundo y molesto, destructivo, capaz de crispar los nervios y en ningun caso forma parte de la belleza del amor verdadero. Sí, uno puede enfadarse por algo que haya dicho o hecho otra persona sin dejar de gustarle o de tratar mal a quien lo dijo o lo hizo. El amor verdadero significa aceptar los desacuerdos como amigos o compañeros y no como adversarios o rivales, pues el amor verdadero no consiste en ganar o luchar. Y tampoco significa degradación, crueldad, ataque o violencia. Hace de tu hogar tu palacio....no tu prisión.

For the rest of Kat’s childhood, she moved from one relative’s house to another’s, up and down the East Coast, living in four homes before entering high school. Finally, in high school, she lived for a few years with her grandmother, her mom’s mom, whom she called “G-Ma.” No one ever talked about her mom’s murder. “In my family, my past was ‘The Big Unmentionable’—including my role in putting my own father in jail,” she says. In high school, Kat appeared to be doing well. She was an honor student who played four varsity sports. Beneath the surface, however, “I was secretly self-medicating with alcohol because otherwise, by the time everything stopped and it got quiet at night, I could not sleep, I would just lie there and a terrible panic would overtake me.” She went to college, failed out, went back, and graduated. She went to work in advertising, and one day, dissatisfied, quit. She went back to grad school, piling up debt. She became a teacher. Kat quit that job too, when a relationship she had formed with another teacher imploded. At the age of thirty-four, Kat went to stay with her brother and his family in Hawaii. She got a job as a valet, parking cars. “I’d come home from parking cars all day and curl up on my bed in the back bedroom of my brother’s house, and lie there feeling desperate and alone, my heart beating with anxiety.

cele 3 secole diferitele lor tipuri de sensibilitate se exprima cel mai bine astfel: aristocratismul: Descartes, domnia ratiunii, marturie despre suveranitatea vointei. feminismul: Rousseau, domnia sentimentului, marturie despre suveranitatea simturilor, minciuna. animalismul: Schopenhauer, domnia dorintei, marturie despre suveranitatea animalitatii. mai cinstit, dar sumbru. secolul 17 e aristocratic, ordonator, trufas fata de animalic, sever fata de inima, "incomod", chiar lipsit de sentiment, negermanic, retinut fata de burlesc si naturalete, inclinat spre generalizare si cu aere de suveranitate fata de trecut, deoarece este increzator in sine. in mare masura si animal de prada, multa deprindere ascetica pt a putea ramane stapan. secolul tariei de vointa dar si al pasiunii puternice. secolul 18 e dominat de femeie, visator, inteligent, cam plat, avand totusi un anumit spirit la dispozitia dorintelor sale, a inimii, libertin in delectarea cu cele spirituale, subminand orice gen de autoritate. ametit, voios, limpede, uman, fals fata de sine, o mare canalie au fond, sociabil. secolul 19 e mai animalic, mai subteran, mai urat, mai realist, mai badaran si tocmai de aceea considerat "mai bun" "mai cinstit" mai smerit in fata "realitatii", mai autentic. dar slab in vointa, dar trist si sumbru, pofticios dar fatalist. nu se teme si nici nu stimeaza ratiunea sau inima. adanc convins de dominatia poftelor [Schopenhauer vorbea de "vointa" dar nimic nu e mai caracteristic pt filozofia sa, decat ca ii lipseste tocmai vointa per se]. pana si morala e redusa la un singur instinct ["mila"]. faptul ca stiinta devenit intr'un asemenea grad suverana arata ca secolul 19 s'a eliberat de dominatia idealurilor. abia o anumita lipsa de pretentii in felul nostru de a dori ne face posibila starea de curiozitate si rigoare stiintifica - aceasta stranie virtute care ne apartine. secolul 19 cauta instinctiv teorii cu ajutorul carora isi simte justificata subordonarea fatalista fata de real. suntem niste oameni care se autodesfiinteaza.

Osvrnimo se, profesore, oko sebe. Šta vidimo? Šta drugi vide? Da li je prizor privlačan? Da li je, drugim rečima, lako Beograd voleti i poštovati? Sa jedne strane vlasotinačka, lužnička, nišavska, belopalanačka, svrljiška, zaglavska, timočka, rekanska, brsjačka pečalbarska duša jadnika koji će prihvatiti svaki, i najgori rad, ali tek kada ga pritisne ljuta nemaština, kad se više nema kud; ne rad već pečalovina, pečal, potmula patnja, duševna bol i poniženje, nastavak meropaškog i sebarskog, rajetinskog rada, životinjski izdržljivo slaganje pare na paru; sa druge psihoza nesite ćiftanske lakomosti, ćar i profit sa što manje rada, pravljenje »poslova« tako što se posao izbegava, pa nije nimalo neobično što i jedan i drugi, i pečalan i ćiftinski rad, dakle svaki rad, izaziva u Srba samo prezir. Beograd je postao grad u kome ni jedan čovek, ni jedan stari ni novi društveni sloj nije na svom pravom mestu. Studenti služe kao kelneri, penzionisani činovnici prodaju đinđuve i opravljaju kišobrane, ljudi koji ni svoje ime ne umeju valjano potpisati dižu mnogospratne palate, gomilaju se kapitali i imanja za koja niko ne zna odgovora na pitanje: otkud i kako? — a u isto vreme mnogi naučnik, profesor, zanatlija pita se posle petog u mesecu šta će sutra ručati. Sve je u zadihanoj jagmi i jurnjavi da bi se zahvatilo što više sa što manje zasluge i truda. Neobrazovani i nesposobni otimaju mesto kadrima i učenima, čitavo društvo izdeljeno je u grupe koje se uzajamno podržavaju rodbinskim, kumovskim, plemenskim, partijskim vezama, a sve drugo što nije u tom orijentalnom klupčetu ti meni ja tebi, bezobzino se gura u stranu, gde god pogled zaustaviš — Miloševa kurdžonska Srbija potiskuje Mihajlovu, Svetozarevu, Skerlićevu plemenitu težnju ka evropskim načinima mišljenja i ponašanja. Beograd danas liči na neki rašireni prostor, privremeni zbeg, Wild West na koji se sjurila kaza i prikaza da što pre zauzme što bolje mesto, pa najbeskrupulozniji, a ne najsposobniji, zauzimaju najviša. Oni, u osnovici svojoj još palančani, ošamućeni i neuravnoteženi novim i stranim gradom, oslobađaju nesputano biologiju samoodbrane, jagme, nestrpljenja. Atavizmi iz seljačkog vremena, rudimenti iz plemenskog patrijarhalizma, bore se sa poslednjim zapadnjačkim usmerenjima Užičana-Francuza, piroćanskih-Londonaca, Bosanaca-Bečlija.