Quotes from Julie Schumacher

Like most of the English faculty, she had dealt with suicidal and homicidal students, students with eating disorders who fainted in class, students with depression, cancer, learning disabilities, dead or dying parents, autism, schizophrenia, gender identity issues, romantic heartbreak, and various syndromes involving the inability to sit quietly and read.

Your desk should send to everyone who sees it the message: All is well; I am in control.

You want undergraduates who can write, think, and read? Stop pretending that writing can be taught across the curriculum by geologists and physicists who wouldn't recognize a dependent clause if it bit them on the ass.

I would like to confess things to her, to throw myself in her lap, to open the cage of my chest and show her the bones.

Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I'm living the life of a fruit fly - the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a "fresh start" that leads to the same moribund conclusions.

I wish I had an ex-wife like you in every department; over in the Fellowship Office, the formerly benevolent Carole continues to maintain an icy distance. I should think her decision to quit our relationship would have filled her with a cheerful burst of self-esteem, but she apparently views the end of our three years together in a different light.)

Addressing the non-tenure-track instructors was a ticklish and morally complicated task—akin to a ship's captain going belowdecks to rouse the galley slaves at their posts.

he has served for three of his four short years at Payne in administration, directing the undergraduate writing center and the much contested/maligned composition program. (No reasonable person outside a university would believe the teaching of composition to be controversial, but of course it is.) Professor West has an open-door policy

She drained the pasta and looked out the window over the sink. In the middle of the street, paying no attention whatsoever to oncoming cars, two little boys were jousting with hockey sticks while riding bicycles, their mother observing through a fog of cigarette smoke and a beer. Human beings, Janet thought, were a disappointment.

As for me, the closest I have come to exaltation has been here at the university, with a book in my hand. Literature has served me faithfully (no pun intended) as an ersatz religion, and I would wager that the pursuit of the ineffable via aesthetics in various forms has saved as many foundering souls as a belief in god.

Whatever I can do to assist in your – or any other firm's – hiring of Mr. Napp I will accomplish with resolution and zeal.

Mr. Leszczynski attended class faithfully, arriving on time, and rarely succumbed to the undergraduate impulse to check his cell phone for messages or relentlessly zip and unzip his backpack in the final minutes of class.

You and I are both in the business of believing in, and promoting, things that don't yet exist. The leap of faith: it's equal parts wishful thinking, vicarious ambition, and bullshit, and yet... I can already envision the moment when I open Troy's new book and find within it, among the acknowledgments, your name and mine...

Jesus," my father mumbled whenever he opened the refrigerator and found health-food peanut butter, brown salt-free bread, and a jar of thriving alfalfa seeds, "the world could end tomorrow and we'd have eaten a last meal of this stuff.

Bee, have you considered a job as a counselor? I think you'd be really good at relating to people. Have you ever met any people by the way?

Discussion was always an unpopular option, leading as it did to calumny, stalemate, lamentation, and wrath.

There is no way to teach someone, I thought, who doesn't like or respect you enough to learn.

Not much else to do in there. There's no TV.

my father says, stirring the soup that he's concocted: tuna and pepperoni in a chicken broth.

How do you know I'm pregnant?" "It's amazing." He cracked his knuckles. "Children always take their own parents for idiots. They come in reeling drunk at 1 am, smelling of cherry brandy and cigarettes, and think the old man's a detective for finding out they weren't studying with a friend.

Children always take their own parents for idiots.

Just because you're playing without the rules doesn't mean they don't exist. If I could have given you anything, I would have given you caution and common sense.

Just because you're playing without the rules doesn't mean they don't exist.

Our mother has taken up knitting since she got sick but doesn't knit well. We keep waiting to see a sweater, even a glove, but she knits without projects in mind, tearing things out to begin again. Sometimes she puts the knitting down and looks out the window, as if there were something in the dark to see.