Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative with our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed, to be unconscious of - others? Does the educational system exist in order to promulgate knowledge, or is its main function rather to universalize a society’s tacit agreement about what it has decided it does not and cannot know?

Pain is inevitable. Misery is optional

Grudges are like hand grenades: it is wise to release them before they destroy you.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

Don’t let your life speed out of control. Live intentionally. Do something today that will last beyond your lifetime.

My karma just ran over my dogma.

Growing is a lifetime job, and we grow most when we're down in the valleys, where the fertilizer is.