Robert Atwan > Quotes

“I'm not usually sold on epiphanies. I am more interested in the opposite experience: not those rare moments of startling insight or realization, but-what I suspect are more common-those sudden flashes of anxious confusion and bewilderment.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2011

“the evening crowd on University Avenue appeared to be living in an earlier American era, one lacking desperation, hysteria, and Fox News.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2013

“Orders make you stupid, the captain told me, figure it out for yourself.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2013

“No matter how carefully we defend ourselves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“His membership in the human race was entirely accidental and unsolicited.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“(Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.)”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“The source of all life warms the living for a moment, holding them briefly before they go back to wasting their lives.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“You don’t understand why I have my work to do—because, at this particular time, you have none at all,”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“But in the real, messy world of creativity, giving away the thing you don’t really understand for the thing that you do is an inevitable tradeoff.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“Public education’s commendable aim of creating “equal opportunity for all” is too easily subverted by the egregious aim of creating a clean conscience for the few. If everybody can “read at grade level,” then we need not be overly concerned if some people get to read fabulous dividend statements and other people, who may be working twice as hard, get to read pink slips. All we need hope is that the latter sort never get to read Marx.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“Innovation is an unruly thing. There will be some ideas that don’t get caught in your cup. But that’s not what the game is about. The game is what you catch, not what you spill.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“Given my empirically based conviction that a stable home life is the single most reliable predictor of a student’s success in school, I am surprised that the Republican Party, self-appointed champion of “family values,” takes no pains to press the point. Of course, to do so would undermine its agenda of dismantling public education, hamstringing teachers’ unions, denying same-sex couples the rights of marriage, preventing working mothers from achieving income parity, curtailing reproductive rights, outsourcing manufacturing jobs, and filling the coffers of the various charlatans who sell education in the form of standardized tests.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“What his humanism says to us is that the human subject should stand apart from his or her circumstances emotionally and intellectually, even as he or she experiences the flux of Fortuna—the Chaucerian “job” writ large in a life—and the mesmerizing power of the moment. Only in this can we find our voice.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“No matter how intellectual and multicolored motherhood becomes as children grow older, the part that says My purpose on earth is to keep you alive has never totally dissipated. Magical thinking on all sides.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2021

“Why do psychiatrists consistently lead the pack of specialties when it comes to taking money from drug companies?” His answer: “Our diagnoses are subjective and expandable, and we have few rational reasons for choosing one treatment over another.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“I did on one or two occasions tell my students they were living in a society that valued people of their age, region, and class primarily as cannon fodder, cheap labor, and gullible consumers, and that education could give them some of the weapons necessary to fight back.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“The experience delivered me into the central project of my adult life as a writer, which is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.”
― Robert Atwan, The Best American Essays 2021

“I try to remember that except for a very few psychopaths, most people on most days are doing the best they can.” I take that for my working motto, though I remain haunted by the thought that if “a kid is just a kid,” then a sixteen-year-old kid is a kid just two years away from voting.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“he finds himself stuck beside a road that only others will travel.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“We want to see the options we refuse to pursue; we like to know what lurks on the other side of the door we never open.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“Are students so intimidated by expertise that they’ve lost confidence in their own powers of observation?”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012

“Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.”
― Robert Atwan, Best American Essays 2012