Presentation quotes for students
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The Conference of the Birds Quotes
“Heart’s blood and bitter pain belong to love,
And tales of problems no one can remove;
Cupbearer, fill the bowl with blood, not wine -
And if you lack the heart’s rich blood take mine.
Love thrives on inextinguishable pain,
Which tears the soul, then knits the threads again.
A mote of love exceeds all bounds; it gives
The vital essence to whatever lives.
But where love thrives, there pain is always found;
Angels alone escape this weary round -
They love without that savage agony
Which is reserved for vexed humanity.”
― Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
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“I doubt my doubt, doubt itself is unsure
I love, but who is it for whom I sigh?
Not Muslim, yet not heathen; who am I?”
― Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
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“I'd rather die deceived by dreams than give
My heart to home and trade and never live.”
― Farīd al-Dīn ʻAṭṭār, The Conference of the Birds
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“The Beginning is lost;
the End stretches into eternity.
Don't bother w
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Biography Conference “Different Lives”
Two weeks ago, I had the great pleasure to be able to attend the Biography Conference “Different Lives” at the University of Groningen’s Biography Institute. You can find the programme and photo’s online on the Institute’s Facebook page.
My reason for attending was my own love for biography and more important, the opportunity to speak with Dutch biographers and aspiring biographers about indexes and why Dutch biographies usually only have names indexes. A year ago, I talked to Jolande Withuis about the lack of a general index in her book about Juliana. From that conversation I gleaned that the absence of a general or subject index was more due to lack of know-how and not knowing about professional indexers, than to anything else.
Responses to my questions about the lack of indexes at the Biography Conference were varied. Some Dutch journalists in the process of writing biographies, displayed a total disinterest in indexes overall. I wonder if they don’t use general indexes in their own research. However, Dutch academics w
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"Under history, memory and forgetting,
Under memory and forgetting, life.
But writing a life is another story.
Incompletion."
These lines by the French philosopher and poet, Paul Ricoeur, are a good introduction to my next topic, a two-day conference on biography I attended in Mexico City in October. The conference was the brainchild of Daniela Spenser, a historian at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (CIESAS), and her fellow historian and colleague, Milada Bazant.
Daniela, it should be said, also has roots in Central Europe, and her late mother's extraordinary life was such a paradigm of 20th century European history that I will digress for moment to summarize The Guardian's recent obituary of her. Her mother's name was Ruth Tosek, and Ruth was born into a Czech-Polish Jewish family in Poland in 1926. The family soon moved to Prague, and when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia In March 1939, Ruth, aged 13, escaped at night with her father through the Czech-Polish border and eventually made it to the UK. Ruth's mother failed to jo
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