Thomas L. Dumm Quotes

• As lovers of truth, we want to be close to it. Sometimes - evil thought, evil temptation - we want to be close to it by misleading others about its presence.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Evil, Temptation, Want

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Book, Writing, Courses

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• There are degrees of loneliness, ways in which the experience of loneliness deepens, becomes something like what we might call a way of life. This way of life is both what is most damaging to us as a culture, and, paradoxically, contributes to its richness. It may in the end be our lasting contribution to the life of our planet.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Loneliness, Degrees, Culture

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• I worry that we don't currently have a democracy in the United States. Instead we have what [political philosopher] Sheldon Wolin has recently labeled a sort of inverted totalitarianism.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Worry, Political, Democracy

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Dog, Lonely, Worry

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn't need to write it."

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Book, Writing, Anecdotes

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I look back on some of my early reviews of others, and realize to my chagrin that I've been as guilty as anybody else on that front.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Looks, Realizing, Guilty

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Writing, Perfect, Trying

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• Worldwide, the twentieth century has seen the rise of extraordinary concentrations of economic and political power - evoking the people as the source of power while simultaneously privatizing its most meaningful exercise. Democracy always seems to be at least slightly elusive under such conditions.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Meaningful, Exercise, People

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, staging.believermag.com. January 2009.

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• One of the reasons I always come back to representations of loneliness in plays, films, and literature is that they give us specific examples of the powerful hold that it has on us, and yet, paradoxically, by representing what can't really be represented, so to speak, they give us ways of going forward even as we fall apart.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Powerful, Loneliness, Fall

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Loneliness, Form, Behinds

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Loneliness, Thinking, Choices

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

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• At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

  Thomas L. Dumm

  Loneliness, Mean, Animal

  Interview with Jill Stauffer, believermag.com. January 1, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

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