If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes ...into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of Three.... The little advance... I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All is changed. All looks strange to me and gives me a feeling which I would rather get away from, although I know it to be the ca...rrying out of natural laws. And I am not complaining. I am doing the same as many old people have done, I suppose, who have led an active life and suddenly find themselves living without a purpose. Oh, my heart is so full. I could write a big book on the subject of going out of this world gracefully.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned la...ws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages... of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write to the point: say immediately what you want to say most, even if it doesn't "come first." There are three reasons for doing ...this. First, you will then have said it, even if nothing else gets said. Second, your readers will then have read it, even if they read no more. Third, having said it, you are likely to have to say something more, because you will have to explain and justify what you chose to say.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that's why they writ...e. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret su...per-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived...I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I'd rea...d, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers--especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed, ...and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »