Bel Kaufman Quotes
-
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?
-
This is from Payroll Division: I wasn’t even teaching in June, and I certainly don’t have $2.75. Apparently they don’t know I’m file # 443-817 and have got me confused with another–possibly.
-
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.
-
Trouble is,” Paul smiled his most charming smile, “a teacher has to be so many things at the same time: actor, policeman, scholar, jailer, parent, inspector, referee, friend, psychiatrist, accountant, judge and jury, guide and mentor, wielder of minds, keeper of records, and grand master of the Delaney Book.
-
Each country has its own manner of telephoning. The Russians, at least, are honest. They say, “It is Ivan Ivanovich who is bothering you.”
-
Dear Bea— I've been wading through a pile of "Due before 3" mimeos—but now at last I know what to do with them: into the wastebasket! I'm also hep to the jargon. I know that "illustrative material" means magazine covers, "enriched curriculum" means teaching "who and whom," and that "All evaluation of students should be predicated upon initial goals and grade level expectations" means if a kid shows up, pass him. Right?
-
I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
-
A marriage, she thought, had to have a reason for being.
-
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.
-
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.
-
To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
-
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.
-
Dear Bea—Can’t make it today—sorry. Parent arriving lunch per. to ask why son got 35% on Midterm. Must answer him. How? Sylvia Dear Syl—Don’t try. There’s no communication; no one really listens. Every man is an island. Give him a container of coffee instead.
-
They lingered over their coffee discussing alimony.
-
I have this colored friend Betty well, I never thought about it one way or the other until one day I went over her house for the first time and her father opened the door and I was surprized to see he was colored. Because, to me I was so used to her she always looked normal.
-
In August they had a bad fright. Her lawyer had suggested that—in view of the circumstances—they drop the divorce. This filled them both with profound dread; at the thought of staying married, of sinking back into the deadly boredom of their pre-divorce days, they felt nothing but horror. They realized more than ever that marriage for them was unthinkable.
-
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.
-
As a former student put it: “In a liberry it’s hard to avoid reading."
-
Your fingers smell of incense—a lover sings to the corpse of his dead sweetheart.
-
Almost through force of habit, she found her lips saying the words she had so often said before: “Let’s not spoil it . . . You will write to me, my dear, my dear . . .” His face was impassive. “I never write,” he said.
-
She wore no make-up, and her small, tense face looked chronically embarrassed, as if it got attached by mistake to the wrong person.
-
Like a child, too, he was warm, unaffected, and selfish. He had the combination, irresistible to women, of ruthlessness and tenderness.
-
Lady stand on line before me, speak English so good, like genius, in America only four years, I ashamed tell twenty-two years; I tell twenty!” To class she went only once. “I don’t go back,” she said emphatically. “Too foolish book, Dick and Jane.” She shrugged disdainfully. “Not Tolstoi!"
-
Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.