Memory is a poet, not a historian.
The memory of happiness is perhaps also happiness
A flower is not a flower. It is made only of non-flower elements: sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of those non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower.
He sat down to write, before realizing he had no idea what to say. He didn’t want to say anything: just send her a smile.
This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth, or of the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.
It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
Eventually everything connects.
I believe that if you look long and hard enough at what you loved best at fourteen and how you lived then and what you saw in the world, it will reveal both the world and you.
It is hard to think about computers of the future without projecting onto them the properties and the limitations of those we think we know today.
All I am, is what I’m going after.
Trust in families and neighborhoods and individuals to make sense of the important question, “What is education for?” If some of them answer differently from what you might prefer, that’s really not your business, and it shouldn’t be your problem.
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience because they measure by accounting methods.
That has always been the dark side of the American dream, the search for an easy way out, a belief in magic.
No one ever became indifferent to these steamers because nothing important can ever really be boring.
“We were making the future,” he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!
Networks of urban reformers will convene to consider the problems of homeless vagrants, but a community will think of its vagrants as real people, not abstractions. Ron, Dave, or Marty—a community will call its bums by their names. It makes a difference.
“I don’t make the rules.” “Sure you do. We all do.”
But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes, or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers; we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the “basics” anymore because they really aren’t basic to the society we’ve made.
I’ve come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality,
The teaching function, in a healthy community, belongs to everyone.
I don’t need the lives, I need the aliveness of the work.
She really does hate parties and crowds and she really does love people one by one in such a way that she’s bound to always be involved in parties and crowds.
But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever. Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five.