Bel Kaufman Quotes
-
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.
-
There is a need for closeness, yet we can't get too close. The teacher-pupil relationship is a kind of tightrope to be walked. I know how carefully I must choose a word, a gesture. I understand the delicate balance between friendliness and familiarity, dignity and aloofness. I am especially aware of this in trying to reclaim Ferone. I don't know why it's so important to me. Perhaps because he, too, is a rebel. Perhaps because he's been so damaged. He's too bright and too troubled to be lost in the shuffle.
-
Education can't make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
I’ve been a good mother,” she said. It was a plea rather than an affirmation.
-
Without love, the art of love is mere acrobatics. Without love, the art of giving is mere etiquette.
-
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the eighteenth-century letter writer and biographer wrote: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.
-
When giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Their evenings were interminable; their Sundays were like their evenings.
-
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?”
-
Extraordinary—that Willowdale Academy and Calvin Coolidge High School should both be institutions of learning! The contrast is stunning. I had a leisurely tea with the Chairman of the English Department. I saw several faculty members sitting around in offices and lounges, sipping tea, reading, smoking. Through the large casement windows bare trees rubbed cozy branches. (One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them"!) Old leather chairs, book-lined walls, air of cultivated casualness, sound of well-bred laughter.
-
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!
-
That sense of power was all she craved.
-
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.
-
A life to live is not a field to cross; yet, somehow, in her chaotic way, Varya was able to keep the house going.
-
Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
-
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.
-
To the young ones she would say bravely that her husband did not love her, but that she could never, never hurt him.
-
Your blouse is whitening on the chair and your parrot Flaubert weeps in French: she left him, and he is sorry.
-
Now, long before it came to the final reckoning, to payment of promise implied, she began to set the stage for the great renunciation. “Let’s not spoil it,” she would say, caressing the man’s lapels with long silken fingers. “Let’s not spoil what we have . . .