Quotes I Love: Week 1 Readings

This picture was taken at my family's pond in the small town of Kingsville, Missouri--
one of my favorite beautiful places.

Since we aren't required to write an official Discussion Board post this week, I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes from the first batch of readings. I hope I can return to them as inspiration for some of the writing and posting I do the rest of this semester:

"A deep map represents understanding of location, not just description. A deep map represents celebration and critique of where you locate yourself" (Brooke 142).

"Our writing comes from our being. The deeper we explore our souls, the deeper and therefore richer will be our writing" (Pipher 35).

"We all have stories to tell. However, we do not necessarily know what they are and why they are important. Writing can help us see why our stories matter, and why we feel a sense of urgency to tell them. Carefully considered, our stories can shed light on our moral assignments" (Pipher 43).

"Don't rush to decide what kind of writing you're going to do or to revise or finish a piece. Let your goal be the writing itself. Learn to let it lead you" (Allen).

"I want to model a type of honest inquiry toward such fraught concepts as racial and cultural difference. This should be expressed as an intellectual curiosity that does not bend to easy answers, but that is also humane and sensitive to one's location and audience" (Desser 47).

"Academic discourse can be such a placeless discourse" (Owens 36).

"Educators have a responsibility to help students resist the cynicism and hyperboredom of contemporary, consumer culture by discovering the kind of self-worth that comes from being amazed at one's local worlds. But to do this we must first learn all we can about the environments our students live in ... give them opportunities to testify about what is wrong and what is good about those worlds ... and ... provide them with a vocabulary with which they might critique their environments (Owens 69-70).

"As educators we pride ourselves on teaching something called critical thinking, but often at the cost of promoting local thinking. 'Higher' learning aims upward, away from the mundane, the everyday, the provincial ... What we need more of is lower learning, thinking that keeps bringing us back to the local conditions of the communities that we and our students return to once we leave the classroom" (Owens 75).