Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on ...to the sidewalk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My one pupil has begun his work with me, and I will give you a description how the lecture is conducted. It is the most important ...point, you know, that the tutor should be dignified and at a distance from the pupil, and that the pupil should be as much as possible degraded.... So I sit at the further end of the room; outside the door (which is shut) sits the scout; outside the outer door (also shut) sits the sub-scout: half-way downstairs sits the sub- sub-scout: and down in the yard sits the pupil. The questions are shouted from one to the other, and the answers come back in the same way--it is rather confusing till you are well used to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough," Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!... Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff? Be off, or I'll kick you downstairs!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I'll come up the steps to the house and the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he'll say, "Good evening, Mr. Younger...." And I'll say, "Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?" And I'll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we'll kiss each other and she'll take my arm and we'll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you.... All the great schools in the world! And--and I'll say, all right son--it's your seventeenth birthday, what is it you've decided?... Just tell me, what it is you want to be--and you'll be it.... Whatever you want to be--Yessir! You just name it, so ... and I hand you the world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is not a democracy, it's an absolute monarchy ruled by King Kid. In a nation of immigrants, the child is automatically mor...e of an American than his parents.... Americans regard children as what Mr. Hudson in "Upstairs, Downstairs" called "betters." Aping their betters, American adults do their best to turn themselves into children. Puerility exercises droit de seigneur everywhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But ...they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »