elbow

In Piaget's terms learning involves both assimilation and accommodation. Part of the job is to get the subject matter to bend and deform so that it fits inside the learner (that is, so it can fit or relate to the learner's experiences). But that's only half the job. Just as important is the necessity for the learner to bend and deform himself [sic] so that he can fit himself around the subject without doing violence to it. Good learning is not a matter of finding a happy medium where both parties are transformed as little as possible. Rather both parties must be maximally transformed - in a sence deformed. There is violence in learning. We can not learn something without eating it, yet we can not really learn it either without letting it eat us. (Peter Elbow, "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process," in College English, Volume 45, Number 4, April 1983, p. 331)

powers

The heart is a pump, but also a furnace. What doesn't circulate passes through or burns away. There are laws about these things, which we have no hope of breaking. (Magdalen Powers, "The Heart is Also a Furnace," in The Heart is Also a Furnace: Stories, p. 37)

feuerbach

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. (Feuerbach, Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, quoted in Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle)

roche

I went to lunch with my student. There were some punk kids there, one with a Minor Threat shirt and the other with Crass patches. I was going to whistle a Minor Threat song as I walked by, but realized it's impossible to whistle Minor Threat songs. Only later did it occur to me how horribly geeky it would have been to whistle a song just to prove to the kids I've got cred. Why don't I just whip out the ticket stub for the first time I saw Fugazi? That'd be cool, right? (Dave Roche, On Subbing: The First Four Years, p. 56)

angelou

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?

If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness. It may be enough, however, to have it said that we survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets (include preachers, musicians, and blues singers).

(Maya Angelou, "Graduation," originally in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, reprinted in 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, edited by Samuel Cohen, pp. 9-21)

yamashita

J.B. was the sort of person who had gone through life trying everything and being second-best at everything. Life was a great elective divvied up into a series of smaller electives. There was nothing he had not tried, but for some reason, there was nothing in particular he wanted to do all the time and forever. If J.B. could have afforded the title, he might have been called a dilettante. But although he was second-best in everything he happened to pursue, no one seemed to really notice. Perhaps it was because he found all tasks so easy and, therefore, boring that J.B. himself was an unassuming projection of boredom. He was what might be called second-best in obscurity, or unrecognized talent, but more often, he was stamped "overqualified." (Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, p. 30)