"I remember one English teacher in the..." - Quote by John Updike
I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.
More by John Updike
“My reading as a child was lazy and cowardly, and it is yet. I was afraid of encountering, in a book, something I didn't want to know.”
“My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.”
“The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.”
More on Education
“Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of society is not natural to mankind.”
“Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.”
“Enjoyment is an art and a skill for which we have little talent or energy... your entire education has has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to be alive now.”