Bel Kaufman Quotes
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.
Quotes to Explore
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Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence...Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.
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The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.
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You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
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“I'm not trying to change the world. I'm trying to stop the world from changing me.”
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I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.
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Now that, my friends, is what we vampires call a good exit.
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The people of South Carolina support conservatives who are trying to push real change, and the people of South Carolina expect their presidential candidates to back them up when they show courage.
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One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.
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People say modernism killed poetry for them: it doesn't rhyme, it doesn't touch a popular musical oral tradition. Years ago, you memorized and read poetry; it was one of the things you were forced to learn. Now it has tiny role in school.
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Jacques Ellul suggested too much information creates a confused sense of impotence: The infinite multiplicity of facts that I am given about each situation makes it impossible for me to choose or decide. I thus adopt the general attitude of letting things take their course. But the course that things take is essentially that of the process of technical development. . . . The more the number and power of means of intervention increase, the more the aptitude and ability and will to intervene diminishes. . . . Information is the main carrier of contraception.
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Because in the New Normal you are more worried about the return of your capital, not return on your capital.
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About 1.2% of the human genome is made up of genes, things that encode for proteins, the stuff that we consider us. There is about 8.3% that's a virus. In other words we're probably about seven times more virus than we are human genes, which is kind of a weird way to thinking about yourself.
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A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects.
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Who buys French cars? Not me.
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Civility is a choice.
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Civility is not simply about manners.
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Nothing costs less nor is cheaper than compliments of civility.
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.
