Our latest in an occasional roundup of quotable quotes about cooking demonstrations, ice skating, paper couture, and ducks.
“What is Maine?”
— April Marquet, a digital production artist from Oakland, Calif., offering the correct response to this Jeopardy! clue on Jan. 9: “Bates, Beal, and Bowdoin are colleges in this state that does not begin with B.”
“I loved going to those camps and being surrounded by strong, talented women who were making a really big impact in college athletics.”
— Alison Montgomery, head coach of women’s basketball, telling the Bates Bobcast podcast about attending Maine summer basketball camps as a girl in the late 1990s and learning from people like fellow Mainer Adrienne Shibles ’91, who was starting her 29-year head coaching career and is now an associate director of athletics at Bates (and whose daughter plays for Montgomery).
“Today people often want art to have a clear and even redemptive political message, but Pope.L gave us neither. He had a brilliant capacity to distill difficult, even horrifying truths about American society into strange and challenging work. It can be truculent, or funny, or both, but it’s never easy.”
— Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, speaking to The New York Times about the art of the late William Pope.L, a member of the Bates faculty from 1990 to 2012, who died Dec. 23, 2023, at age 68.
“Start with the visceral to ignite the cerebral and end with the political.”
— Author, award-winning chef, and food justice advocate Bryant Terry, this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote speaker, explaining the source of his food activism and how, for him, activism needs to start at the human level.
“If you can boil a pot of water, you can make this dish.”
— MLK Day keynote speaker Bryant Terry, as he began a cooking demonstration, preparing a recipe from one of his cookbooks, as part of his keynote presentation.
“The idea that you would go to a school like Bates and take a cooking class feels foreign to people. I think that’s rooted in classism: Traditionally, people who make the food didn’t or don’t always go to college. But cooking is a serious art form, and there’s something about cooking and baking that empowers students.”
— Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Tyler Harper, offering one reason he led a bread-making workshop on MLK Day at Bates that included discussions about environmental justice and African American baking.
“The reality is no one else will do this. No one else will cook lunch for the community every day, no one else will do paperwork to get kids out of refugee camps. What we do is not fun or easy, but we can’t just walk away.”
— Erin Reed ’08, executive director of Trinity Jubilee in Lewiston, on the organization’s imperative to serve the most vulnerable in the community.
“I sew a lot and I feel like paper looks cool when it’s folded in a certain way. And I like to read and write a lot. So I thought incorporating words and stories into my garment would be cool.”
— Ashley Taylor ’27 of Lexington, Mass., on using newspapers and magazines as the “fabric” for the outfit she created for the 2023 Trashion Show.
“Not only was he a fantastic person, but he was one of the best captains we could ever ask for. We were able to put our full trust into Bill. And if he said, ‘OK guys, we’ve got to go hard today. Guys, we’ve got to focus on defense,’ whatever he said we took that word as gospel.”
— Mike Boornazian ’16 recalling his friend and Bates basketball teammate Billy Selmon ’15, who died Jan. 28, 2023, after emergency surgery.
“I’m just hanging out, watching ducks.”
— Kai Anderson ’27 of Poland, Maine, while gathering visual data for an assignment for “Lab-Based Biological Inquiry: Wildlife Sampling and Identification,” taught by Assistant Professor of Biology Eric LaFlore. He counted 40 to 60 mallard ducks, 11 domestic dogs, and four American crows.
“I really love cooking food for people and serving it in dishes that I have made.”
— Alex Provasnik ’25 of Arlington, Va., who works as an assistant in the Olin Arts Center ceramic studio, talking about why bowls are the favorite things she’s made during her own studio time. (She also loves her mugs.)
“We’d been talking about skating all week, and that morning our schedules all magically lined up so we could get out on the ice. I figured I’d bring out my camera to get some shots of the biggest thing to happen in hockey since the Miracle on Ice.”
— Mac Gaither ’24 of Palo Alto, Calif., describing the simple joy of pond hockey on Lake Andrews.
“In that hour, we happened to see something that was surprising. It was kind of like, ‘Huh, that’s weird.’”
— Associate Professor of Physics Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, recalling the moment in 2022 when he and fellow researchers noticed an unusually high amount of compressed gas from an ancient starburst formation, and observation that led researchers, including Diamond-Stanic, to an explanation of a cosmic phenomenon known as “odd radio circles.”
Categories Society and culture Student Life
