Julie Schumacher Quotes

We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon,

By the way, I'm not usually attracted to danger," I said. "Up until now I've led a pretty boring life."

"Boredom is good!" Dr. Rasman looked pleased. "Boredom is why God invented books. Are you still in your book club?

I wish him episodes of glorious, sun-washed tedium and a loss of innocence he will contemplate for the rest of his life.

In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd wager that only 10 percent of the English instruction list will answer your call for nominations. Why? First, because more than a third of our faculty now consists of temporary (adjunct) instructors who creep into the building under cover of darkness to teach their graveyard shifts of freshman comp; they are not eligible to vote or to serve. Second, because the remaining two-thirds of the faculty, bearing the scars of disenfranchisement and long-term abuse, are busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices.

Suffice it to say that the LOR has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office.

I shall wish her well and be the first to welcome her to "the writing life," which, despite its horrors, is possibly one of the few sorts of lives worth living at all.

I found the project to be a bit quiet (that is, dull), which may have led to the manuscript's current confabulation - a pseudo autobiography in which the speaker portrays herself as a fifteen-year-old girl/cheetah amalgam.

Talking to a therapist, I thought, was like taking your clothes off and then taking your skin off, and then having the other person say, Would you mind opening up your rib cage so that we can start?

There is something absent in me, I thought. Something incomplete. Even my mother couldn't describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.

One theory here: the deanery is annoyed with our requests for parity and, weary of waiting for us to retire, has decided to kill us. Let the academic year begin!

A drowning person doesn't rescue herself.

My mother says that some books are good no matter when you read them, and some are good at a particular moment; they come into your life at just the right time.

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT.

As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help - aka Mr. Napp - only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the "save" button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one's only recourse - unpalatable though it may be - is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one's limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends - all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed.

Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former maso

Unknown meaning, I thought. That was me.

I had just wanted to be part of a story; I wanted to be a person who had a story to tell.

and we both know how beautiful the book will be, how clearly it will speak to something within us - some previously unarticulated thought or reflection that, once recognized, we will never want to be without again.

Do you want to stand here talking about the car, or are you going to get in it?" CeeCee asked. I was the person with horrible red hair and a mound of pink crust surrounding a diamond in her ear. I was at risk, and I had just made out with a girl in a bathroom. I got into the car.

Boredom is why God invented books.

Opening a book in the middle of a chapter always made me feel like I was interrupting a group of strangers, wandering unannounced into their villages and apartments and taxis and slums.

We can't stick together if we're going to different places," CeeCee said.

Sociology has gone the way of poli-sci and econ, now firmly in the clutches of rabid number crunchers who have abandoned or forgotten the link between their abstruse theoretical musings and the presence of human beings on the planet's surface;

I would outlaw literature exams entirely; I would also eschew the twin barbarities of 'attendance' and 'participation' as grading criteria, necessitated by workload increase.

(Currently, we count ourselves fortunate to have functional toilets. I don't know what your living conditions are at Lattimore - tidy and sterile, I suspect - but here, given a construction project initiated on behalf of our Economics faculty, who Must Be Kept Comfortable at All Times, we are alternately frozen and nearly smoked, via pestilent fumes, out of our building. Between the construction dust and the radiators emitting erratic bursts of steam heat, the intrepid faculty members who have remained in their offices over the winter break are humid with sweat and dusted with ash and resemble two-legged cutlets dredged in flour.)

Maybe the things she loved most weren't meant to be permanent. Maybe the fact that they existed was enough.

(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.)

Where to start, Fitger thought. The department was a funhouse of dysfunctional characters. Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most.

To the matter at hand: though English has traditionally been a largish department, you will find there are very few viable candidates capable of assuming the mantle of DGS. In fact, if I were a betting man, I'd wager that only 10 percent of the English instruction list will answer your call for nominations. Why? First, because more than a third of our faculty now consists of temporary (adjunct) instructors who creep into the building under cover of darkness to teach their graveyard shifts of freshman comp; they are not eligible to vote or to serve. Second, because the remaining two-thirds of the faculty, bearing the scars of disenfranchisement and long-term abuse, are busy tending to personal grudges like scraps of carrion on which they gnaw in the gloom of their offices. Long story short: your options aren't pretty.

Depression is an illness, and no fault of the person who suffers from it

Now in my middle fifties, an irrelevant codger, I find it discomfiting to see this generation dancing to the music of apocalypse and carrying their psychic burdens in front of them like infants in arms.

Belatedly it occurs to me that some members of your HR committee, a few skeptical souls, may be clutching a double strand of worry beads and wondering aloud about the practicality or usefulness of a degree in English rather than, let's say, computers. Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician - a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy - the insertion of oneself into the life of another.