I so enjoy being old because for the first time I don’t have to do anything-work, teach, study. I feel very good about myself-and at my age I can say no to anything now if I don’t want to do it. What a liberating word.
BEL KAUFMANWhen giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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I suggest just Good and Bad at the end of the term on report cards. Or maybe nothing. Frank Allen
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… good teachers, like Tolstoy’s happy families, are alike everywhere.
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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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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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Education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
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A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil’s environment who treats him with respect.
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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.
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One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have “windows with trees in them.
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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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To the young, cliches seem freshly minted.
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Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
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People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.
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The clerical work is par for the course. “Keep on file in numerical order” means throw in wastebasket. You’ll soon learn the language.
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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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