May, out of context
this month's quotables
Each day I pause to write down the things that bring me joy: the places where I experience happiness (‘found joy’) and the places where I contribute to the happiness of others (‘brought joy’).
I also use this notebook to collect random quotes that I find interesting or meaningful or that stand out. At the end of each month I’ll post these random quotes, shared out of context.
If an undergraduate paper is a “one-night stand,” a research article, book, or dissertation is a “long-term relationship.” (Keith Hjortshoj)
[in response to a post on why you should include iodized salt on your Tuesday prep list] Thanks for pointing that out. I'm snooty pants over here with my kosher salt but nobody wants a goiter when everything else is collapsing too. (/TwoXPreppers)
The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar. (Stephen King)
The end of the world is a fairly comforting concept, because — in theory — we wouldn't have to survive it. Maybe what's been fucking us up, more than anything, hasn't been finding a way to cope with the world ending but finding a way to cope with the fact that it didn't. (from The Last by Hanna Jameson)
I’ve never met a strong person with an easy past. (Atticus Finch)
I like to dream about a people who have the wits and the strength of character to choose what they like and want from complex technology, and just leave what they don't need aside - instead of letting everything become a need and then an obligation and then a mess. (Ursula K. Le Guin)
I will look after you and I will look after anybody you say needs to be looked after, any way you say. I am here. I brought my whole self to you. I am your mother. (Maya Angelou)
Rebekah Bennetch: Rhetorician with a Rebel Heart
Equal parts academic, advocate, and artist, Rebekah is a force in the classroom and on the page. A sharp communicator with a soft spot for compassion, she’s rewriting what it means to teach with integrity in the age of AI and institutional inertia. Whether she’s mentoring students, moderating a reading group, or fighting for equity in higher ed, she brings clarity, courage, and care to every corner of her work. She thinks in metaphors, writes with precision, and isn’t afraid to challenge authority—especially when authority gets in the way of justice or good pedagogy. (ChatGPT’s summary of me)
Today, I live and see the world and my work through a lens that compels questions about how our stories shape us, and our relationship with the world in which we live. It is in these moments that I cannot not be a narrative inquirer. (Caine et al., 2013)
Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts. (Antonio Negri)
Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. (from “The rise of end times fascism” by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor)
In order to make earthly planetary survival possible, some versions of this world need to end. (Robyn Maynard)
Silence wasn’t a choice for me. (Ms. Rachel, on her speaking out in support of Gaza)
I have often argued to students, only in part to be perverse, that one cannot understand a history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost. (Lagemann, 1989)
I am rooted, but I flow. (Virginia Woolf)
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. (from 1984, George Orwell)
We all come into the world unfinished, still stitching ourselves together. (Maggie Smith)
Live the questions now. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
People who start movements do so not because they hate an institution but because they love it too much to let it descend to its lowest form. (Parker J. Palmer)
Who I am is who I come from. (Keeta Gladue)
We in a position that where we cooperate when necessary, be we do not necessarily cooperate. (Canadian PM Mark Carney)
Go talk shit on your podcast, Chase. (Layla from Secret Lives of Mormon Lives, season 2)
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy. (from Nuremberg Diary, G. M. Gilbert)
In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge. (Colette)
The themes — critical awareness, self-understanding, and social commitment — recur in all the essays; on occasion, they overlap. This is because one person wrote them, a teacher with her own passion for coherence, her own sense of incompleteness, her own desire to ask questions of the world. ( (from the preface of Landscapes of Learning, Maxine Greene)
The basic ground keeps us upright every day — and, according to our stories of origin, its dirt is what we ourselves are made of. It’s our fundament. Ultimately, it demands our reverence, but it does so quietly, since its contents and workings are always out of sight and remote from what we confidently know. (Daniel Coleman)
It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!
Still, the sun was hot. Still, one gets over things.
Still, life had a way of adding day to day.
(from Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf)
Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously. (Prentis Hemphill)
Nothing can justify the number of civilian casualties (tens of thousands of women and children) inflicted by Israel in Gaza in the last two years. We should end all U.S. military aid to Israel now. (GOP rep Thomas Massie)
I imagine that global citizens of a postplagiarism world might reject binary notions entirely, shaking their heads at the futility of arguments about good versus bad students or pedagogy versus policing. Those who insist on focusing on dualities might show themselves as less intellectually capable than those who can tolerate the chaos and embrace the complexity of what ever it means to integrate, to become whole, as a learner and as a person. (Sarah Elaine Eaton)
I use the term wide-awakeness … without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness.
Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious. (Maxine Greene)
My compliance is not to be mistaken for consent. My consent is not to be taken for granted. Only I can grant a True Yes. (from Defy: The power to say no in a world that demands yes by Dr. Sunita Sah)
I know it’s hard. The world is on fire. Metaphorically, and figuratively. However, it has always been on fire. There has never been a single author that had the immense luxury of writing at a time of absolute peace.
And so, choosing this work, you are entering a lineage of despair. And it’s up to you to turn the sentence into a medium from which we can understand each other and make something new out of this. (Ocean Vuong)
