Category Archives: Quotes

Words to Ponder #26

Today we have a double-header. They were both too appealing for me to choose one over the other.

It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated.

–Edith Hamilton

If I were asked to enumerate ten educational stupidities, the giving of grades would head the list… If I can’t give a child a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to lock my desk and go home and stay there.

–Dorothy De Zouch

Words to Ponder #18

I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don’t write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

–Nikki Giovanni

Words to Ponder #16

Nature is intricately and infinitely connected. The minute I name something and begin to regard it as a separate entity, I break this unbreakable entity. So that which makes it possible for us to seek truths about the universe and about ourselves has within itself the guarantee that we will never be able to find the Truth. Our knowledge must be forever fragmented, because that is the nature of systematic knowledge.

–Katherine Paterson, Gates of Excellence (1981)

Words to Ponder #14

If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, urea, and electricity, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart?

–Diane Ackerman

Words to Ponder #12

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

–Mary Oliver, When Death Comes