Eric Spreng

“With a freedom unavailable to me as a historian, my imagination was feeding off history that I had written.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“One of the strange things about teaching is that you can never know what your effect will be on others; can never know, if you have something to teach, who your real students will be, the ones who will take what you have to give and make it their own—“what you have to give” being, in no small part, what you yourself learned from some other teacher, someone who wondered whether you would absorb what she had to give, someone who is, by the time you’re old enough to write about the experience, as old as your parents, perhaps even dead—can never really know which of the young people clustered around the seminar table is someone whom the teacher or the text has touched so deeply, for whatever reason, that the lesson will live beyond the classroom, beyond you.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

“image works as particularity, not as generalization. That is how art school changed my thinking about history and how visual art set me free.”
― Nell Irvin Painter, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

“Another important factor in expanding the circle is exposure to stories. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains how stories teach children to empathize and identify with people whose perspectives and identities may be very different from their own: “We see personlike shapes all around us: but how do we relate to them?… What storytelling in childhood teaches us to do is to ask questions about the life behind the mask, the inner world concealed by the shape. It gets us into the habit of conjecturing that this shape, so similar to our own, is a house for emotions and wishes and projects that are also in some ways similar to our own; but it also gets us into the habit of understanding that that inner world is differently shaped by different social circumstances.”
― Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil