Hyperbolic aphorisms

Hyperbole is the quicksand of the aphorist, who would swallow the universe in a single sentence.

Steven G. Kellman, "Image Is Not Everything," American Scholar (Autumn 2019), p. 116, 117 (reviewing Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work)

Each racist incident is part of something bigger

No discussion about racism is just about one incident for people of color, because we cannot divorce ourselves from the past pain of systemic racism, or the future repercussions of current abuse.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 206

The fight for justice keeps evolving

What happens when the youth roll their eyes at principles we've spent our lives fighting for, when they've decided that they are not only outdated, but oppressive?

And this is important to remember, for all of us. No matter what our intentions, everything we say and do in the pursuit of justice will one day be outdated, ineffective, and yes, probably wrong. That is the way progress works. What we do now is important and helpful so long as what we do now is what is needed now. But the arguments I was having in college are not the arguments the world needs now as I prepared to send my son to college. And if I refuse to acknowledge and adjust to that, all I'm doing is making things harder for a generation that would really lke to move things forward.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p.  187

Microaggressions add up

Regular exposure to microaggressions causes a person of color to feel isolated and invalidated. The inability to predict where and when a microaggression may occur leads to hypervigilance, which can then lead to anxiety disorders and depression.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 169

Hard to imagine readers of your writing

Even published academics may find it difficult to imagine real people—interested colleagues rather than pejorative judges—sitting at the other end of their sentences. 

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 117

Many attributes neccessary for academics' success

To be a successful academic, it is not enough merely to have mastered the craft of writing intelligibly. You must also be creative enough to produce original research, persuasive enough to convey the significance of your findings to others, prolific enough to feed the tenure and promotion machine, confident enough to withstand the slings and arrows of peer review, strategic enough to pick your way safely through the treacherous terrain of academic politics, well organized enough to juggle multiple roles and commitments, and persistent enough to keep on writing and publishing no matter what.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 66

What's privilege?

The definition of privilege is in reality much simpler than a lot of social justice discussions would have you believe. Privilege, in the social justice context, is an advantage or a set of advantages that you have that others do not.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 59

Race and class are both problems

Even without the invention of race, class would still exist and does exist even in racially homogenous countries. And our class system is oppressive and violent and harms a lot of people of all races. It should be addressed. It should be torn down. But the same hammer won't tear down all of the walls. What keeps a poor child in Appalachia poor is not what keeps a poor child in Chicago poor—even if from a distance the outcome looks the same. And what keeps an able-bodied black woman poor is not what keeps a disabled white man poor, even if the outcomes look the same.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 13

Tinkering with sentences as they come out

Despite every attempt I have ever made to become a faster and less finicky writer—to forge relentlessly forward, laying down a thousand new words per hour as Rowena Murray suggests that any writer can learn to do—I seem to be constitutionally incapable of drafting even a single sentence without doubling back on it at least a few times to adjust various details.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 60 (citing Rowena Murray, Writing for Academic Journals, 3rd ed. (Berkshire UK: Open University Press, 2013), chap. 3)

Sometimes there are good reasons to be literal

Elsie glared at him. "Do you always have to be so literal?"

Homer gave her question some though, then said, "Maybe it's a coal mining thing. If you don't look at the roof literally, it might fall literally on top of your head."

Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), p. 309

Facing racism can be scary for whites

These are very scary times for a lot of people who are just now realizing that America is not, and has never been, the melting-pot utopia that their parents and teachers told them it was. These are very scary times for those who are just now realizing how justifiably hurt, angry, and terrified so many people of color have been all along. These are very stressful times for people of color who have been fighting and yelling and trying to protect themselves from a world that doesn't care, to suddenly be asked by those who've ignored them for so long, "What has been happening your entire life? Can you educate me?" Now that we're all int he room, how do we start this discussion?

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 5

What's the best place to write?

Whether you work in an airy studio, a stone tower, a bathroom, or even a bed, there is no "right" place for writing. The best place to write is anywhere you do.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 38

You can have your gender

Perhaps we should pause here for a moment and clarify something that I'm often asked about and that seems to be a point of grave misunderstanding. I don't want to take away your gender. I don't want to abolish gender roles, or even gender rules. I do want to abolish gender assumptions, and therein lies the most exciting part of my identity: I am a metaphor. I am not a metaphor for how "you too can be genderfluid." If you aren't inherently fluid, I would never suggest that you try to be or you pretend to be. I'm a metaphor for being free, for a grander ideal. I am a walking, breathing representation of the fruits of self-acceptance.

Jeffrey Marsh, "Life Threats," in Micah Rajunov & Scott Duane eds., Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 76

It looked like infectious diseases were conquered

Writing in the heady days of new antibiotics and immunizations, esteemed microbiologists Macfarlane Burnet and David White predicted in 1972 that “the most likely forecast about the future of infectious diseases is that it will be very dull.”¹ They acknowledged that there was always a risk of “some wholly unexpected emergence of a new and dangerous infectious disease, but nothing of the sort has marked the last fifty years.” Epidemics, it seemed, were of interest only to historians.

David S. Jones, History in a Crisis—Lessons for Covid-19, New Eng. J. Med. (April 30, 2020) (quoting Macfarlane Burnet & David O. White, Natural History of Infectious Disease, 4th ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972)

Email messes with priorities

I think email has been a disaster for all of us. The idea of letting the inbox determine your order of priority is utterly ridiculous,but it's very, very hard to resist.

Michèle Lamont (sociologist), quoted in Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 37

Regimented routines don't come easily

For most people, however, daily scheduled writing is neither an intuitive habit to adopt nor an easy one to sustain. As any drill sergeant or Mother Superior can attest, few humans possess the intrinsic self-discipline required to adhere to a strictly regimented routine day after day and week after week, no matter how beneficial its effects.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 18

For many writers, frustration and exhilaration are both part of the process

[T]he words frustrating, frustrated, and frustration so often accompanied narratives of accomplishment and even ecstasy—exhilaration, happiness, contentment—that I began to wonder whether, at least for some writers, frustration is a prerequisite for elation. Perhaps the pleasure of the breakthrough, the intensity of the flow, would lose some of its emotional force if writing were easy all the time.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 162

Academic writers should cross-train

Rather than regarding activities such as lecturing, blogging, and community engagement as time-sucking distractions from your research, try reconceptualizing them as muscle-building tonics instead. The more you cross-train by writing across genres as part of your everyday academic work, the better prepared you will be to adapt to new audiences when you write for publication.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 121

Academic writers have many, many writing habits

Productivity, I discovered, is a broad church that tolerates many creeds. Some successful academics write daily, others sporadically; some at home, others at work; soe on trains or airplanes or during children's sports practice, others in distraction-free environments; some on a word processor others in longhand or using voice-recognition software; some whenever they have a few minutes free, others only when they have cleared hours or days of uninterrupted time.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 15

Turns out you don't have to write daily to get stuff done

[R]oughly seven out of eight academics surveyed admitted that they do not write every day. Daily writing, it turns out, is neither a reliable marker not a clear predictor of productivity.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 15

Middle class can become fascist, says Orwell

It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 258 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Mechanization cuts you off from life, says Orwell

[I]n a fully mechanised world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as "art"; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. Mechanise the world as fully as it might be mechanised, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 230 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Lost time is truly lost

Lost yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset: sixty golden minutes, each set with sixty diamond seconds. No reward is offered, because they are lost forever.

attributed to Horace Mann

hat tip: CH

Orwell notes the ambiguity in "work" and "play"

But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games or merely lounging about—and these things will not fill up a lifetime—he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 229 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

The British empire was what made British life comfy

[T]he high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last think that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the empire together.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 191-92 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

When does change happen?

The two women would 'put up' the preserves over a couple of days and invariably Marthe would ask, 'When does a cucumber become a pickle?'

At first he'd tried to answer that question as though she genuinely wanted to know. But over the years he realised there was no answer. At what point does change happen?

Louise Penny, Still Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p.184

Orwell's loathing of the criminal law

I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of trhe whole machinery of so-called justice. Say what you will, our criminal law (for more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. . . . I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders. I never went into a jail without feeling (most visitors to jails feel the same) that my place was on the other side of the bars. I thought then—I think now, for that matter—that the worst criminal who ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 178 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Thankful to have so many to thank

I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have a book published, but that I have some many people to thank.

Louise Penny, Still Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. viii

How Orwell came to hate imperialism

I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it. Seen from the outside the British rule in India appears—indeed, it is—benevolent and even necessary; and so no doubt are the French rule in Morocco and the Dutch rule in Borneo, for people usually govern foreigners better than they govern themselves. But it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny. Even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian is aware of this. Every "native" face he sees in the street brings home to him his monstrous intrusion. And the majority of Anglo-Indians, intermittently at least, are not nearly so complacent about their position as people in England believe. . . . The truth is that no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression. 

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 175-76 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

War of the Generations after the Great War

[T]hose years, during and just after the war, were a queer time to be at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or had been for a century earlier. Throughout almost the whole nation there was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been reversed and forgotten . . . . Essentially, though of course one could not then see it in perspective, it was a revolt of youth against age, resulting directly from the war. In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine guns. Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been conducted with supreme incompetence. By 1918 everyone under forty was in a bad temper with his elders, and the mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority. At that time there was, among the young, a curious cult of hatred of "old men." The dominance of "old men" was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution from Scott's novels to the House of Lords was derided merely because "old men" were in favour of it.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 170 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)