Community College Quotes

“When I first started dual enrollment at Lake City Community College you could print in the library for free. I printed whole books. Like James Legge's 1891 "Tao Te Ching" translation. He was to parentheses what Emily Dickinson was to the Em Dash. "To know and yet (think) we do not know is the highest (at­tain­ment); not to know (and yet think) we do know is a dis­ease." I'd sit around listening to records as their dot matrix printer whirred. Slowly printing a book from the 6th century BCE. They had those hard blue plastic headphones. Your ears would ache. But Rimsky-Korsakov was pretty metal. Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response" had me picking "ZOOM" as my meditation mantra. Reading Vonnegut with his nonlinear narrative. Books will often have Acknowledgments. A page or two. Things that helped you. What matters. Everything I write is an Acknowledgment. What matters. And I've printed whole books.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“As I wrote at Lake City Community College in the mid-90s there were a great many things I could only discuss with the help of literary devices – allusion, allegory, metaphor. And now... I'm just like... "Well, stepdad drank himself to death." May you all find a way to write what you now cannot write.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“The rest of the place was so dilapidated-but-trying that some of its offices and classrooms were still housed in old buildings abandoned by the neighboring State Mental Hospital, unfit for the mentally challenged but perfetly fine for "educating" the parated of probably-ought-to-major-in-business willfully ignorant know-nothings that rotated in and out of its former cells for a couple of months each semester before dropping out.”
― Mark Panek, Hawaiʻi

“Graduating after twenty- five years at Community College was a personal triumph for me. I couldn't let myself down again.”
― Charmaine J Forde