29 Quotes by Julie Schumacher

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.

I haven’t published a novel in six years; instead, I fill my departmental hours casting words of praise into the bureaucratic abyss. On multiple occasions, serving on awards committees, I was actually required to write LORs to myself.

Your desk should send to everyone who sees it the message: All is well; I am in control.

Suffice it to say that the LOR has usurped the place of my own work, now adorned with cobwebs and dust in a remote corner of my office.

Maybe the things she loved most weren’t meant to be permanent. Maybe the fact that they existed was enough.

I would like to confess things to her, to throw myself in her lap, to open the cage of my chest and show her the bones.

One theory here: the deanery is annoyed with our requests for parity and, weary of waiting for us to retire, has decided to kill us. Let the academic year begin!

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.

Depression is an illness, and no fault of the person who suffers from it.