Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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?
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Then, aware once more of her obligation, she asked politely: “You only wrriter, or your work also?” “I hope to teach English one day.”
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Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.
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I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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As a former student put it: “In a liberry it’s hard to avoid reading."
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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.
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Each country has its own manner of telephoning. The Russians, at least, are honest. They say, “It is Ivan Ivanovich who is bothering you.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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A marriage, she thought, had to have a reason for being.
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Like a child, too, he was warm, unaffected, and selfish. He had the combination, irresistible to women, of ruthlessness and tenderness.
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Your fingers smell of incense—a lover sings to the corpse of his dead sweetheart.
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They lingered over their coffee discussing alimony.
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To meet this expense, he sold his violin. Besides, Charlotte did not care for music.
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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.
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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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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.