Bel Kaufman Quotes
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Please admit bearer to class—Detained by me for going Up the Down staircase and subsequent insolence.
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He was taking off his tie, the dreadful tie with the green mermaid on it. “It’s your tie, Sam—I hate it! Why must you always . . .” I’m not saying it right, she thought, not any of it.
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Education can't make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
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Apparently this r had to be worked for: Varya told me that as a child she couldn’t pronounce it properly, and that her father would make her repeat a series of exercises about gorgeous grapes growing on Mount Ararat and three hundred thirty-three drummers drumming on three hundred thirty-three drums.
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Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.
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Had set out to tell you exactly what happened. But since I am the one writing this, how do I know what in my telling I am selecting, omitting, emphasizing; what unconscious editing I am doing?
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Without love, the art of love is mere acrobatics. Without love, the art of giving is mere etiquette.
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When giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.
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She luxuriated in these disembodied telephone conversations. “Darling, I can almost see you, almost touch you now.” It was intimate yet distant; thrilling yet safe.
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This is just the first day; you’ll get used to it. The rewards will come later, from the kids themselves–and from the unlikeliest ones.
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Their evenings were interminable; their Sundays were like their evenings.
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I’ve been a good mother,” she said. It was a plea rather than an affirmation.
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I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.
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That sense of power was all she craved.
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Do not weep, do not weep, my little wife: song of hope and encouragement in marriage.
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Your blouse is whitening on the chair and your parrot Flaubert weeps in French: she left him, and he is sorry.
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To the young ones she would say bravely that her husband did not love her, but that she could never, never hurt him.
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I’ll never retire as long as I live—that’s like retiring from life! I’ll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you’re in good health, living is exciting on its own.
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St. Peter: “Who is knocking at my gate?” Voice: “It is I.” St. Peter: “Go away, we don’t need any more school teachers here!
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Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
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A life to live is not a field to cross; yet, somehow, in her chaotic way, Varya was able to keep the house going.
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She used to think of it vaguely as “We don’t get along,” but it wasn’t even that. There were no clashes or quarrels between them, no question of infidelity. He certainly wasn’t the type for an affair, and at forty-eight, her hair graying and her figure gone, she had resigned herself to weary middle age. It was just that together, bleakly confronted with each other, they experienced a vast and hopeless boredom.
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Wrrite, wrrite, Lapochka, why you don’t wrrite?” and assure me that a horse, even with four legs, stumbles. I found it difficult to explain to her what I was writing. “It’s about Colley Cibber,” I said. “He was an actor, playwright and poet.” “Also poet?” Varya asked suspiciously. “Who he? Pushkin?”
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The long procession of men flickered before her like faces on cards quickly riffled—blurred, two-dimensional. Only their desire for her mattered.