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She had never intended to work at a university, which everyone knew was full of misfits with badly swelled heads.
there were worse sorts of tonics for the academic soul than a three-year stint in administration.
Hoffman had the personal charm of a KGB agent, and was basing her “much-needed reforms” on a thorough distrust of both professors and students.
Having recently attended a presentation in the Art Department that involved the painting of historical portraits on the testes of sheep, he felt capable of withstanding the quirks in any field.
Econ epitomized everything that was wrong with higher education.
Discussion was always an unpopular option, leading as it did to calumny, stalemate, lamentation, and wrath.
Franklin Kentrell posed the idea of eliminating the dashes in paragraph three. He didn’t care for the dash as a unit of punctuation. It was too breezy and too offhand.
This was what she got for failing to move across state lines and adopt an unpronounceable alias, post-divorce.
Janet began to wonder whether he thought of her as a couch, or a convenient spot in a parking garage.
It appeared not to be a breeding ground for hepatitis A or E. coli, and was free of X-rated graffiti.
Booze was a mutual, frequently practiced activity; they did it well.
In his sweatpants and matching jacket, Klapp had the physique of a boiled potato with legs.
He didn’t generally work with the undergraduates, whom he found to be undisciplined and unprepared for education.
Here was a group of the oppressed right now, playing foosball and eating junk food in a corner.
They wanted trigger warnings and petting and coddling—when what they needed, Roland thought, was a kick in the ass.
He noted the fraying cuffs of Lincoln’s shirt (signifying loneliness, debt, and a PhD that had led to a rotisserie of underpaid jobs)
Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most.
she needed someone to talk to who wouldn’t take her failure personally—and someone who had more up-to-date information about pregnancy than Jesus.
Fitger had already endured a mailroom conversation in which Kentrell had compared his struggles on the toilet with those of Santiago and his marlin in The Old Man and the Sea.
He didn’t care for Gladwell’s ambitions or for his pedagogical philosophy, which seemed to have been developed from a North Korean model, each student to be hewn and fashioned into a cog in the grinding wheel.
It reminded him of the impermanence of his work: how deeply invested in it he was, and how little it meant to almost anyone else—which was as it should be.
rank bewilderment (both eyebrows lifted, and hands palm-up toward the ceiling—the international symbol for what the fuck).
“Just tell me they didn’t put quotation marks around ‘special’ pasta,” he said. “You know I can’t eat things that are badly punctuated or misspelled.”
don’t waste your time being impressed by people (usually men) who are already adequately impressed by themselves.
She knew him and knew how to torment him—and wasn’t such specific, intimate knowledge a form of love?
his mother’s (unfulfilled) last wish had been that she be embalmed and displayed in the window of Nordstrom, her favorite store.
“Is he talking about blow jobs?” Fran asked. “I never heard of that being written into the wedding vows.”
“That won’t work. There’s a Norwegian in there,” Fitger said. “It has to be a member of the English department.” “Why are you harboring Norwegians?”
