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Happy? It was a word she had been fond of using when she was young. But it meant one thing at eighteen, another at thirty-two. Its only test was contrast with unhappiness.
Bel Kaufman -
Stripped of her calculated clothes and the careful camouflage of her make-up she was tired, unalluring, middle-aged. And that was something she would never admit to herself, for most of the illusion of beauty is the conviction of beauty.
Bel Kaufman -
A marriage, she thought, had to have a reason for being.
Bel Kaufman -
Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did.
Bel Kaufman -
A man couldn’t jump higher than himself, she pointed out to me. And he couldn’t help it if he was a “zoodnik”; one so annoying, he made you itch.
Bel Kaufman -
I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
Bel Kaufman
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She wore no make-up, and her small, tense face looked chronically embarrassed, as if it got attached by mistake to the wrong person.
Bel Kaufman -
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT MEETING AT 3 PM IN SCIENCE LAB 409 ON: THE TOTAL EXPERIENCE OF THE PUPIL: SHOULD MACBETH BE TAUGHT IN THE 6th TERM INSTEAD OF THE 5th?
Bel Kaufman -
She hesitated, searching in her scant vocabulary of taken for granted health the precise word to convey the inchoate distress, the alien sense of something gone wrong.
Bel Kaufman -
Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
Bel Kaufman -
But if there is such a thing as social commitment in literature, I think it must manifest itself in a reader's awareness of the human condition, in the writer's touching some common nerve ending. I think this kind of social commitment, like a lady's slip, should be there but it must not show.
Bel Kaufman -
Sam had a child’s faith in the healing power of the morning, she thought later, as she lay sleepless at his side; he believed that a good night’s sleep could iron out all the accumulated wrinkles of the day. She resented his ability to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow while she tossed restlessly in bed; his even breathing was an affront to her wakefulness.
Bel Kaufman
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She hasn't been back since, and we have a young per diem substitute who had taught shoes in a vocational high school on her last job. Though her license is English, she had been called to the Shoe Department, where she traced the history of shoes from Cinderella and Puss in Boots through Galsworthy and modern advertising. "Best shoe lesson they ever had," she told me cheerfully. "Until a cop came in, dangling handcuffs: 'Lady, that kid I gotta have.'" To her, Calvin Coolidge is Paradise.
Bel Kaufman -
That I was a writer was further proof of God’s far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.
Bel Kaufman -
The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn't it a magnificent day today?
Bel Kaufman -
If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!
Bel Kaufman -
You’re not God. Nothing is your fault, except, perhaps, poor teaching.
Bel Kaufman -
As a former student put it: “In a liberry it’s hard to avoid reading."
Bel Kaufman
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Laughter keeps you healthy. You can survive by seeing the humor in everything. Thumb your nose at sadness; turn the tables on tragedy. You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.
Bel Kaufman -
Each country has its own manner of telephoning. The Russians, at least, are honest. They say, “It is Ivan Ivanovich who is bothering you.”
Bel Kaufman -
To the outside world, of course, this job is a cinch: 9 to 3, five days a week, two months' summer vacation with pay, all legal holidays, prestige and respect. My mother, for example, has the pleasant notion that my day consists of nodding graciously to the rustle of starched curtsies and a chorus of respectful voices bidding me good morning.
Bel Kaufman -
To meet this expense, he sold his violin. Besides, Charlotte did not care for music.
Bel Kaufman