Novelists From The United States

"I learned to love my country, in two ways. I began to learn the geography of the South-the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. The other thing was the incredible heroism on both sides. It's hard to believe men were as brave as those men were. Somehow sense of honor was stronger than fear. God knows, they felt fear. I would really like it to be stressed that my work helped me to love my country. I hope my work does that for other people, learning both our virtues and our vices."

"Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy-and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it."

"Being a female, she spurns him on."

"Teaching here isn't so bad. Once you accept as one of the ineluctable laws of nature that kids will continue to say "Silas Mariner" and "Ancient Marner" and "between you and I" and "mischievious" and that the administration will continue to use phrases like "egregious conduct" and "ethnic background" you can go on from there."

"We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it."

"I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance."

"My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window."

"One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them.""

"Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!" The reply, of course, is: "That's just it."

"Paul asks how I would have handled a love letter from a student. I don't know — by talking, maybe, by listening. I don't know. How sad that we don't hear each other — any of us. Major issues are submerged by minor ones; catastrophes by absurdities."

"A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect."

"When I tried to tell McHabe that it would have been more valuable to let Ferone keep his appointment with me than to kick him out, he let me have it: "When you're in the system as long as I," he said (They all say that!) "you'll realize it isn't understanding they need. I understand them all right — they're no good.""

"With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know."

"Frances Egan, the school nurse, left her nutrition charts long enough to tell me there was nothing that could have been done. "Evelyn had a rough time with her father," she said. "Once she came in beaten black and blue." "What did you do for her?" "I gave her a cup of tea." "Tea? Why tea, for heaven's sake?" "Why? Because I know all about it," she said, shaking with anger. "I know more than anyone here what goes on outside — poverty, disease, dope, degeneracy — yet I'm not supposed to give them even a band-aid. I used to plead, bang on my desk, talk myself hoarse arguing with kids, parents, welfare, administration, social agencies. Nobody really heard me. Now I give them tea. At least, that's something." "But you're a nurse," I said helplessly. She showed me the Directive from the Board posted on her wall: THE SCHOOL NURSE MAY NOT TOUCH WOUNDS, GIVE MEDICATION, REMOVE FOREIGN PARTICLES FROM THE EYE... Are we, none of us, then, allowed to touch wounds? What is the teacher's responsibility? And if it begins at all, where does it end?"

"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!"

"How can I take seriously such mimeographed absurdities as "Lateness due to absence," "High under-achiever," and "Polio consent slips"? —SylDear Syl, I'll match yours any day with "Please disregard the following." —Bea"

"Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it."

"Your lesson plan is excellent — except for the Emily Dickinson line: "There is no frigate like a book." The sentiment is lovely, the quotation is apt — only trouble is the word "frigate." Just try to say it in class — and your lesson is over."

"The ceiling fell? The ink ran dry? A student dared to smile? Of every new disaster I prove myself the master By sending out more circulars, more circulars to file! A missing kid? A kissing kid? A paper on the floor? For every major crisis One remedy suffices: More circulars, more circulars, to put into a drawer!A crowded cafeteria? A substitute's hysteria? A visitor from Syria? A missing Book Receipt?I merely send out circulars To add to other circulars To add to other circulars Numerical and neat!"

"In Memory of Those Who Died Waiting for the Bell"

"You teachers are all alike, dishing out crap and expecting us to swallow it and then give it back to you, nice and neat, with a place in it for the mark to go in. But you're even phonier than the others because you put on this act — being a dame you know how — and you stand there pretending that you give a damn. Who you kidding? We're dirt to you, just like you're dirt to the fatheads and whistle-blowers who run this jail, and they're dirt to the swindlers and horn-tooters who run the school system."

"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."

"Like most chairmen, he teaches only one class of Seniors; the most experienced teachers are frequently promoted right out of the classroom!"

"The cardinal sin, strange as it may seem in an institution of learning, is talking. There are others, of course — sins, I mean, and I seem to have committed a good number. Yesterday I was playing my record of Gielgud reading Shakespeare. I had brought my own phonograph to school (no one could find the Requisition Forms for "Audio-Visual Aids" — that's the name for the school record player) and I had succeeded, I thought, in establishing a mood. I mean, I got them to be quiet, when — enter Admiral Ass, in full regalia, epaulettes quivering with indignation. He snapped his fingers for me to stop the phonograph, waited for the turntable to stop turning, and pronounced: "There will be a series of three bells rung three times indicating Emergency Shelter Drill. Playing records does not encourage the orderly evacuation of the class.""

"During what was presumably my lunch period, Admiral Ass (a Mr. McHabe, who signs himself Adm. Asst.) appeared in my room with Joe Ferone. "This boy is on probation," he said. "Did he show up in homeroom this morning?" "Yes," I said. "Any trouble?" the Admiral asked. There we stood, the three of us, taking each other's measure. Ferone was watching through narrowed eyes. "No. No trouble," I said."

"The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun."

"When I had asked why they were taking English, a boy said: "To help us in real life.""

"The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "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; "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."

"I don't allow anyone to talk to me like that. So you're lucky — you're a teacher."

"Why do you think nothing concrete and lasting happened out of the 60s? Lots of people have been saying this lately, and I can't help feeling that the changes were so profound and total that no one remembers that there were changes! The 50s, my friends, happened in a different country than this one. We did not get everything we wanted, no. The world is not perfect now, and is that why some of us think we accomplished nothing? … Try to remember what life was like in the 50s. That's all I can say to that. It's the power structures that are trying to pretend that the change wasn't lasting, so they can convince people that protests and the like are futile now. But they lie. I'm glad to see that many young people aren't buying it."

"In some sense, every magician is a weaver, merely one who works with invisible strands of the hidden light. With it we weave our various forms, just as a weaver produces cloth, and then stitch them into the images we desire, just as a tailor sews cloth into a tunic or robe. If we be journeymen in our craft, forces will come to inhabit our forms, just as a person will come to buy the tunic and place it over his body. But if we have plumbed the secret recesses of our art, if we are masters of our craft, then we can both weave the forms and place our own bodies within them."

"All love affairs are tragedies in the end unless the lovers die at the same moment."

"Absolute authority will be delegated. Full responsibility will be assumed. Those who succeed will receive advancement and satisfaction of desire. Those who fail will die."

"The sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the West."

"Virginal shy lights, Wrought of the leaves to allure to the whisper of vows, When lovers pace timidly down through the green colonnades Of the dim sweet woods, of the dear dark woods, Of the heavenly woods and glades, That run to the radiant marginal sand-beach within The wide sea-marshes of Glynn."

"And yet shall Love himself be heard, Though long deferred, though long deferred: O'er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: Music is Love in search of a word."

"O Trade, O Trade! Would thou wert dead! The time needs heart — 'tis tired of head."

"On Whitman - His poetry refreshed me like harsh salt spray."

"On William Morris - He caught a crystal cupful of the yellow light of sunset, and persuading himself to dream it wine, drank it with a sort of smile."

"On Swinburne - He invited me to eat; the service was silver and gold, but no food therein save pepper and salt."

"On Poe - I esteem Poe more highly than my countrymen are wont to do . The trouble with him (Poe) was, he did not KNOW enough. He needed to know a good many more things in order to be a great poet."

"Music means harmony, harmony means love. Love means God."

"My principle is, the artist shall put forth, humbly & lovingly, without bitterness, the very best & highest that is within him,utterly regardless of contemporary criticism."

"Sweet Sometime, fly fast for me."

"'Daring with my poem 'Special Pleading' to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style'"

"Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud."

"Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea! Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and the sun, Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath mightily won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain."

"The incalculable Up-and-Down of Time."

"We'll slide down the surface of things..."

"Specks—specks all over the third panel, see?—no, that one—the second one up from the floor and I wanted to point this out to someone yesterday but a photo shoot intervened and Yaki Nakamari or whatever the hell the designer's name is—a master craftsman not—mistook me for someone else so I couldn't register the complaint, but, gentlemen—and ladies—there they are: specks, annoying, tiny specks, and they don't look accidental but like they were somehow done by a machine—so I don't want a lot of description, just the story, streamlined, no frills, the lowdown: who, what, where, when and don't leave out why, though I'm getting the distinct impression by the looks on your sorry faces that why won't get answered—now, come on, goddamnit, what's the story?"