Doing Quotes (page 1188)

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.
George Bernard Shaw
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Wallace Stegner
Tell me about this Wizard Howl of yours."He's the best wizard in Ingary or anywhere else. If he'd only had time, he would have defeated that djinn. And he's sly and selfish and vain as a peacock and cowardly, and you can't pin him down to anything."Indeed? Strange that you should speak so proudly such a list of vices, most loving of ladies."What do you mean, vices? I was just describing Howl. He comes from another world entirely, you know, called Wales, and I refuse to believe he's dead!
Diana Wynne Jones


For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered in tinsel, while the trees opened our presents."What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo."Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?
Norton Juster