Archive for the ‘Quotes of Note’ Category

A student or a scholar

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

One of the things I discovered about myself during the past year is that I'm a student, not a scholar. I've always thought of myself as a "lifelong student," but I'm not sure I really understood what that meant till recently. In my view, a master's candidate is a student, a ...

Safety paranoia

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Here's a quote from Stephen Fry's novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book.If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by ...

Dahl on travel and civilization

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

In this excerpt from Roald Dahl's Boy, his mother asks if he wants to go to Oxford or Cambridge. "No, thank you," I said. "I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China." You must remember that ...

Dahl on the life of businessmen and writers

Monday, July 20th, 2009

In the following excerpt from Roald Dahl's Boy, he's left public school at 18 to take a job with Shell Oil company. He is taking their internal training courses and is learning the business. ...[E]very morning, six days a week, Saturdays included, I would dress neatly in a sombre grey suit, ...

My future is assured

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

Vaynerchuk tells anecdotes, but his main activities veer more into the uncool profession of teaching. In the above-linked interview he admits to being a "class clown," and I have found in my twenty years of teaching that that one characteristic is a better predictor of who ends up a teacher ...