Michelle Kuo > Quotes

“To be educated meant you read books and entertained ideas that made you feel uncomfortable. It meant looking in the mirror and asking, What have I done that has cost me anything? What authority have I earned to speak? What work have I put in? It meant collapsing your certainties and tearing down your self-fortifications. You should feel unprotected, unarmed, open to attack.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“I wonder what it was all for and consider the idea that once you stop thinking about something, it disappears.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“But then what is a human for? A person must matter to another, it must mean something for two people to have passed time together, to have put work into each other and into becoming more fully themselves. So even if I am wrong, if my dreaming is wrong, the alternative, to not dream at all, seems wrong, too.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“Misfortune can present people with moral tests they simply cannot pass, writes philosopher Nir Eisikovits.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books, and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“It was a strange, sudden, unexpected opposition between writing and caring.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“Writing was like stepping back into an old dream.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“He who guards his mouth and his tongue guards his soul from troubles, she quoted to me.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“The most fundamental thing is just to make sure these kids feel cared for. And it’s that simple.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“Overt racism was less palatable, but “crime” became the strategic, and politically acceptable, way for politicians to make statements about race: Crime was, as it is today, a code word for what poor black people do.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“It took work to build an inner warmth toward yourself; without it, you could not see yourself in others, in heroes.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“But what was a battle without a wound? Wounding was what I had signed up for.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“I wrote this because writing is how I understand things. I wrote this to get closer to knowing you, and myself, too.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

“This place that last forever. Where time be just stopping. A place where time don’t matter no more.”
― Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship