When giving comes directly from the heart, it can never disappoint or embarrass.
BEL KAUFMANThe clerical work is par for the course. “Keep on file in numerical order” means throw in wastebasket. You’ll soon learn the language.
More Bel Kaufman Quotes
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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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Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.
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You can’t laugh and be angry, you can’t laugh and feel sad, you can’t laugh and feel envious.
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Love is the ultimate giving, an expression of one’s best self.
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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 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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I suggest just Good and Bad at the end of the term on report cards. Or maybe nothing. Frank Allen
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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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Education can’t make us all leaders, but it can teach us which leader to follow.
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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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Time collapses and expands like an erratic accordion.
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I like the word OLD. Not senior, that’s for proms. Older? Older than whom? ‘Old’ is honorable and ripe
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“Let it be a challenge to you” means you’re stuck with it; “interpersonal relationships” is a fight between kids; “ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline” means call the cops.
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I want to point the way to something that should forever lure them, when the TV set is broken and the movie is over and the school bell has rung for the last time.
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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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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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Never mind the cream; it will always rise to the top. It’s the skim milk that needs good teachers.
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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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People ate bread made of the shells of peas because there was no flour.
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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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“Language Arts Dept.” is the English office; “literature based on child’s reading level and experiential background” means that’s all they’ve got in the Book Room; “non-academic-minded” is a delinquent; and “It has come to my attention” means you’re in trouble.
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Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money-in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
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I am writing this during my lunch period, because I need to reach towards the outside world of sanity, because I am overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the clerical work still to be done, and because at this hour of the morning normal ladies are still sleeping.
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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.
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The heart has its reasons; it’s the mind that’s suspect.
BEL KAUFMAN