Julie Schumacher Quotes & Sayings

But an idea had presented itself to him, knocking at his brain like a nighttime traveler, and instead of shutting the door in its face, Browles built it a fire, he drew a chair for it up to the hearth and spent half a decade trying to decipher and then convey what it struggled to tell him. He was patient and industrious and quietly determined. Buffeted by setbacks and rejection and his own limitations, he persevered. — Julie Schumacher

I thought about the people I had met who were in pain but were pretending that everything was fine. And I thought, this is what books can do for us: they can acknowledge our experience and take the lid off our isolation and make us feel less alone. To me, books have always been a great source of comfort
not because they allow for escapism (though that's certainly one of their benefits) but because they offer recognition. Face to face with other people, we might give in to the impulse to pretend that everything is "fine"; but when we open the cover of a book
I'm talking mostly about novels here
there is no shame and no need to pretend. Good fiction has never lied to me. When I immerse myself in a book I feel recognized and therefore relieved. I turn the pages and think, yes, I have felt that too
that loneliness and joy and anxiety and confusion and fear. When I read, what once seemed meaningless gains meaning, and I am not alone. — Julie Schumacher

Boredom is why God invented books. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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? — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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; — Julie Schumacher

But there are other faculty here on campus who are not disposed to see notable scholarship ignored; and let it be known that, in the darkened, blood-strewn caverns of our offices, we are hewing our textbooks and keyboards into spears. — Julie Schumacher

(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.) — Julie Schumacher

Unknown meaning, I thought. That was me. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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? — Julie Schumacher

Thanks to Lawrence Jacobs, world's most enthusiastic and supportive spouse, who read the first draft of this book and said, I'm glad we have different last names. — Julie Schumacher

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

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. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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

I haven't published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself. — Julie Schumacher

Believing in books is a lot like believing in God. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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 — Julie Schumacher

I love to sleep. My astrological sign is the sloth. — Julie Schumacher

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

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

A drowning person doesn't rescue herself. — Julie Schumacher

Young would-be novelists and poets believe that art is eternal. Au contraire: we are in the business of ephemera, the era of floating islands of trash, and most of the things we feel deeply and inscribe on the page will disappear. — Julie Schumacher

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! — Julie Schumacher

You've clearly been charged with hiring a jack-of-all-trades. And Dr. Auden is that mythical creature you seek: fully qualified to teach British and American literature, women's studies, composition, creative writing, intermediate parasailing, advanced sword swallowing, and subcategories and permutations of the above. — Julie Schumacher

To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people - and now I was expected to pronounce a judgement about its worth? — Julie Schumacher

Fitger behaves like more of an ass than he actually is. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

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

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

And as if she had opened a hidden door, I felt the patterned surface break and give way, and the words let me in. I still loved opening a book and feeling like I was physically entering the page, the ordinary world fizzing and blurring around the edges until it disappeared. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher

(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.) — Julie Schumacher

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

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. — Julie Schumacher

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. — Julie Schumacher