The Shakespeare Requirement Quotes

“Where to start, Fitger thought. The department was a funhouse of dysfunctional characters. Academia was, traditionally, a refuge for the poorly socialized and the obsessive; but English, at Payne, had a higher percentage of crackpots than most.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“It was a day like a thousand others, she said. It had begun with caffeine and ended in a desire to slam her head into the drawer of her desk.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“What kind of appointments?” Fran squinted at the screen. “Let’s see. The red ones are usually mandatory or urgent: info session for new chairs and directors; convocation; faculty cabinet; humanities council; faculty appeals board; university caucus…” Fitger had the sensation that he was listening to his obituary read aloud, including a detailed account of the things that would kill him.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“reality was bleak and often unbearable, their puny lives a meaningless trudge toward the blank vault of death.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“don’t waste your time being impressed by people (usually men) who are already adequately impressed by themselves.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Like most of the English faculty, she had dealt with suicidal and homicidal students, students with eating disorders who fainted in class, students with depression, cancer, learning disabilities, dead or dying parents, autism, schizophrenia, gender identity issues, romantic heartbreak, and various syndromes involving the inability to sit quietly and read.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Your desk should send to everyone who sees it the message: All is well; I am in control.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“During the summer, when the students were gone, she looked at the members of the professoriat muddling slowly across the quad and imagined she was working at a nursing home.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Addressing the non-tenure-track instructors was a ticklish and morally complicated task—akin to a ship’s captain going belowdecks to rouse the galley slaves at their posts.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Still, all was quiet downstairs…and now the concept of leaving his bed had sent an urgent body-gram to his bladder, which over the years had become a thimble-sized organ with an impetuous streak.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“She drained the pasta and looked out the window over the sink. In the middle of the street, paying no attention whatsoever to oncoming cars, two little boys were jousting with hockey sticks while riding bicycles, their mother observing through a fog of cigarette smoke and a beer. Human beings, Janet thought, were a disappointment.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“He found the smell of the library—the quiet, musty scent of books—oddly reassuring. 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. Men like Roland Gladwell imagined themselves with each completed project to be hewing their likenesses in bronze; but all scholarly endeavor was eventually reduced to these codified symbols tucked into endless paper beds, then bound between tombstone covers and seldom disturbed.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Discussion was always an unpopular option, leading as it did to calumny, stalemate, lamentation, and wrath.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Kentrell had an innuendo-filled manner of speaking,”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Dean Philip Hinckler was prone to semi-sentences that expired, half-finished, in rhetorical cul-de-sacs.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“Ostensibly, he was doing his assistant a favor, but he was aware, given the ravenous look that Lincoln Young occasionally gave him, that the favor he preferred would be for his supervisor to die and free up a job.”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement

“his writing had stalled (the market perhaps saturated at last with egotistical male writers);”
― Julie Schumacher, The Shakespeare Requirement