When I teach people, I marry them.

I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.

The truth is that I am enslaved... in one vast love affair with 70 children.

As the blackness of the night recedes so does the nadir of yesterday. The child I am forgets so quickly.

I am my own Universe, I my own Professor.

No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit. It drags it out from where it would hide.

To feel as well as hear what someone says requires whole attention.