“The generality of mankind is lazy. What distinguishes men of genuine achievement from the rest of us is not so much their intellectual powers and aptitudes as their curiosity, their energy, their f...”

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”

“At it's highest level, the purpose of teaching is not to teachit is to inspire the desire for learning. Once a student's mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.”

“What is much harder to handle is the sense that you have to live up to the mark someone else has set for you. The grades become too important, the competition too frantic, the fear of disappointing...”

“And the end of this paradox is that only when the child is thus free can he have the proper attachment to his parents; only when we allow his independence can he then freely offer us love and respe...”

“And most of the failures in parent-child relationships, from my observation, begin when the child begins to acquire a mind and a will of its own, to make independent decisions and to question the o...”

“All words are pegs to hang ideas on.”

“A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”