Robert Coles > Quotes

“Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“Be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; the addition of new dramatic sequences; the emphasis accorded to one figure or another in the recital; and the degree of enthusiam, of coherence, the narrator gives to his or her account.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?”
― Robert Coles

“Novels and stories are renderings of life; they cannot only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisors — offer us other eyes through which we might see ... Every...student...will all too quickly be beyond schooling, will be out there making a living and, too, just plain living — that is, trying to find and offer to others the affection and love that give purpose to our time spent here....[Characters] can be cautionary figures...who give us pause and help us in the private moments when we try to find our own bearings”
― Robert Coles, M.D., The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“...ambitious intelligence [is] a force that can demolish the 'heart's reasons' — namely, a warm empathy, a considerateness toward others, a willingness, even, to let them become one's teachers, however humble or troubled their lives.”
― Robert Coles, M.D., The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“We are the creature of language, and through language we affirm ourselves, we find out about the world, including ourselves, through words, and we share with one another through language.”
― Robert Coles

“We are, obviously, creatures of language, those who are equipped distinctively to ask and wonder, to try to sort out: creatures of consciousness thoroughly aware that there is an end to this gift of life, that dust does indeed return to dust, hence time is a hauntingly finite possession. No wonder then, that we summon words to the task of explanation--an attempted explanation of what has been, what is, what might be, what ought to be. No wonder, too, we call upon words to represent ourselves, divert ourselves, humor ourselves, instruct ourselves, extend ourselves imaginatively, through our stories and more stories, told to one another from childhood through our last days, and told to us on paper by certain men and women who have turned an aspect of their humanity into a professional calling.”
― Robert Coles

“Where you read a book and when you read and with whom (as your fellow readers) can make a big difference!”
― Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism

“They don’t seem to be getting tired, the way we thought. Maybe it’ll have to be a race, and I hope we win. Some people sometimes think we won’t, and maybe I believe them, but not for too long.”
― Robert Coles, Children of Crisis

“One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.”
― Robert Coles, Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage

“She is not alone in her courage. The South is filled with an underground of sly liberals in the midst of situations hardly likely to support their efforts.”
― Robert Coles, Children of Crisis

“We don't need cameras here; we have enough trouble controlling our eyes! I waste my time looking and not seeing. If a camera helped us to
see, we would be better off-but it would not be us, seeing. A camera distracts you. It makes you less of a person. Words are even worse; they make birds Ay away, and they make us dizzy with noise. Who can pay attention to the world while someone chatters? The books of the Anglos are as noisy as their planes overhead. My mother says that the books fill up our head with words, and take over our eyes, too. We end up seeing what the words told us about. We stop seeing; the noise of the words takes over. I have a cousin who is a New Hopi; he went to a BIA school, and lived with the Anglos in Albuquerque. He came back to us and said that he doesn't look at the mesa anymore. He doesn't watch the clouds, see them meeting, leaving each other, doing a dance for us. He thinks about them; he talks to himself about them. He wishes his head could be quiet, the way it used to be. Stick with the Anglos, and you have a noisy head!”
― Robert Coles, Doing Documentary Work

“I never liked the way the professor used the books — zeroing in on "the text," raking and raking, sifting and sifting it through narrower and narrower filters.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“To these kids, dates mean very little. They live in the present, and they don't have dates for the present. there is just sunrise and sunset and then another sunrise, and the vents that take place during the day or night.”
― Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism

“She like history . . . and wished the English teacher would ask the class to read history books. Instead the teacher was 'always' assigning poems.”
― Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism

“The bestiality I have seen in the South cannot be attributed only to its psychotic and ignorant people. Once and for all, in the face of what we have seen this century, we must all know that the animal in us can be elaborately rationalized in a society until an act of murder is seen as self-defense and dynamited houses become evidence of moral courage. Nor is the confused, damaged South the only region of this country in need of that particular knowledge.”
― Robert Coles, Children of Crisis

“Then he told me this country is what’s made him good, because he had a lot of trouble with his own daddy, and they fought like hell, and his mom would just cry and cry, and she was weak-willed, and whatever her old man wanted and said, she’d go along. But my daddy took argument with his daddy and there was lots of trouble. I mean, my daddy was the first one in his family to call a nigger Mr. and call a nigger Mrs., and he’s been their best friend in this part of town, and they know it. You want to know how he got to be their friend? I’ll tell you: through being in the army, and through realizing that’s what America is all about, including our state of Mississippi! The Stars and Stripes, they’re meant to be for everyone, daddy says. He saw a colored man save a white man’s life over in ‘the Nam,’ and he’s never forgotten what he saw. He says this country is way bigger than any damn problem we have.”
― Robert Coles, The Political Life of Children

“I guess this place is where your intellect changes. I guess it's no behavior-modification place. but a history tutor said Harvard used to be . . . worried as much about the students' morality, their character, as . . . exams.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“Constructing a good reading list involves not so much matching student interest with author's subject matter . . . as considering the degree of moral engagement a particular text seems able to make with any number of readers.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“We are nothing to the white people; we are a few Hopis, but they are Americans, millions of them. My father told me that their leader, whoever he is, ends his speech by saying that God is on their side; and then he shakes his fist and says to all the other nations: You had better pay attention, because we are big, and we will shoot to kill, if you don’t watch out. My mother says all the big countries are like that, but I only know this one. We belong to it, that is what the government of the United States says. They come here, the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] people, and they give us their orders. This law says . . . another law says . . . and soon there will be a new law. In case we have any objections, they have soldiers, they have planes. We see the jets diving high in the sky. The clouds try to get out of the way, but they don’t move fast enough. The water tries to escape to the ocean, but can only go at its own speed.”
― Robert Coles, The Political Life of Children

“The black children I have come to know in different parts of this country, even those from relatively well-off homes, say critical things about America and its leaders at an earlier age than white children do — and connect their general observations to specific experiences. A black child of eight, in rural Mississippi or in a northern ghetto, an Indian or Chicano or Appalachian child, can sound like a disillusioned old radical.”
― Robert Coles, The Political Life of Children

“Sometimes we try to get our students into an analytic frame of mind, and we onder why they get bored after awhile! I've had a great reaction from some of the kids when I do a summary of a story, and then ask the kids if that story gets any bells going in their heads — gets them thinking about their own lives. that's when they start paying attention, and that's when they'll speak up.”
― Robert Coles, The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism

“read to each other from novels by George Eliot and Dickens and Hardy and Tolstoy during my elementary school years. My brother Bill (now a professor of English)”
― Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination