Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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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Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It's the skim milk that needs good teachers.
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Her disappointment was minor compared to her astonishment. “Again I didn’t win? But last year I didn’t win also!”
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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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I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.
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But I am busiest outside of my teaching classes. Do you know any other business or profession where highly-skilled specialists are required to tally numbers, alphabetize cards, put notices into mailboxes, and patrol the lunchroom?
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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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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?
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As a former student put it: “In a liberry it’s hard to avoid reading."
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I feel no different than I felt at 99, 98 or 97. Just because you live a long time, you get all this attention. Just because you survived? Of course, I survived a lot.
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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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That was what marriage was: the ultimate knowledge of each other, with no need to preen or to pretend. Even its irritations came from closeness.
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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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Your fingers smell of incense—a lover sings to the corpse of his dead sweetheart.
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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.
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The preciousness of every moment is emphasized with every tick of the clock. Isn't it a magnificent day today?
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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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A marriage, she thought, had to have a reason for being.
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Appreciation is appreciated.
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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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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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Children are the true connoisseurs. What’s precious to them has no price, only value.
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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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I like the word OLD. Not senior, that's for proms. Older? Older than whom? 'Old' is honorable and ripe...