Jackmccullough > Jackmccullough's Quotes

“I'm buried beneath an avalanche of papers, I don't understand the language of the country, and what do I do about a kid who calls me "Hi, teach!"?
Syl
INTRASCHOOL COMMUNICATION
FROM: Room 508
TO: Room 304
Nothing. Maybe he calls you Hi, teach! because he likes you. Why not answer Hi, pupe?
The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in waste-basket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble.”
― Bel Kaufman, Up the Down Staircase

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ”
― Paulo Freire

“We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours—the time we’re given on earth—does that belong to us?”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“After six months in the academy, trainees learn to: Respect the chain of command and their place on the bottom of that chain. Sprinkle “sir” and “ma’am” into casual conversation. Salute. Follow orders. March in formation. Stay out of trouble. Stay awake. Be on time. Shine shoes.”
― Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District

“Even if crack cocaine laws and mandatory minimum sentencing were not racist in their original intentions, the war on drugs is a de facto war against poor blacks. Outcomes that so negatively affect African Americans should place the moral burden on those who continue to advocate imprisonment as our national drug policy. Communities cannot survive when incarceration is the norm.”
― Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District

“From 1925 to 1975, despite some variance, about 1 in 1,000 Americans was imprisoned at any given time. In 1975, there were approximately 200,000 prisoners. Thirty-two years later, after thirty-two years of drug war, there are 2.3 million behind bars—1 in every 130 Americans.100 Canada, by comparison, imprisons 1 in every 750 people. Every country in Western Europe imprisons still fewer. Pick any country and we lock up more people. America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. This, in Eric Schlosser’s coinage, is the prison-industrial complex:”
― Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District

“He was like everybody in war. He believed God was on his side. Everybody got God on their side in a war. Problem is, God ain’t tellin’ nobody who He’s for.”
― James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

“This one, this affluent dot along the Metro North train, was like one of those beaches where sea tortoises drop off their eggs—no one was from here, and they stayed only as long as it took the little ones to hatch.”
― Ted Thompson, The Land of Steady Habits

“Trubba not.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“We never have time, do we, for all that we don’t exactly want to do.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, American Appetites: A Classic of American Literature – Gripping Thriller of Privilege and Murder

“and both men listened as if hearing it for the first time, as we so frequently listen, in such circumstances, to tales whose outcomes we already know, or have already been told us by our friends.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, American Appetites: A Classic of American Literature – Gripping Thriller of Privilege and Murder

“And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration. “Oh, poor you!” she would say. “You’re looking so tired!” Or “You must be feeling so lonely!” Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity. It was not an attractive quality, in her children’s opinion.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“In my opinion,” Red said, “going to Florida for the winter is kind of like … not paying your dues. Not standing fast for the hard part.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“He’d been up early all his life and though everybody said the best thing about retirement was sleeping in, he just couldn’t feature it. If he found himself in bed later than six he felt like a degenerate,”
― T.C. Boyle, The Harder They Come

“The golf course. He never thought he’d sink so low, but he did, like every other old duffer across the land.”
― T.C. Boyle, The Harder They Come

“When she finished, the white teacher, his face streaked with tears, tapped his boss on the shoulder, and like a television cop handing in his badge and gun, he solemnly removed the shiny new Teach for America button fastened to his sweater vest, placed it in Charisma’s palm, and walked off into the squall.”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“Why groups never follow the sweet, gentle child is obvious, but I wish it would happen just once.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“You can’t help but admire the sense of smell the wealthy possess. Even at the edges of a foul, trash-infested city, they always find a way to hunt down the last patches of pristine territory and claim them as their own. At”
― Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak

“They were so posh that even their Dutch sounded French.”
― Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine

“It is like the wrath of God, minus God: every action is weighed in some unfathomable balance, and at any time, the most trivial movement may be punishable by death. The slightest misjudgment could easily be the last judgment. Not that this makes death trivial, but dying does seem more absurd than ever—the hellish pain, the formless horrors that bulge out of the body, the unbearable wailing of the lads in their final moments, their hands on their torn-up bodies as they clutch at their own entrails and moan for their mothers. They are children, countless wasted boys of barely twenty, who should be out in the sun, living their lives, but have sunk into the muck here instead.”
― Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine

“The fact of my arrest condemns me, everyone knows this; if I am a suspect then I am already a traitor, and traitors become prisoners, and prisoners become bodies, and bodies become numbers. The quota has taken my name and voice, so why dignify my question with an answer?”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“He wondered what ever had made him go into this business. He couldn’t remember, exactly. He’d always been a good student, able to write papers and take tests, at the top of his class. What worried him were his abilities in the real world. Perhaps he’d settled on law because it seemed the career that was most like school.”
― Scott Lasser, Say Nice Things About Detroit: A Novel

“Dearborn, the home of Ford and Arabic street signs. Not many brothers out there, which, of course, had always been old man Ford’s design. Keeping Arabs out had probably never occurred to him.”
― Scott Lasser, Say Nice Things About Detroit: A Novel

“Like most New Englanders, she’d never outgrown a childlike anticipation of the season’s first snow. Of course, also like most New Englanders, what she wished for in December she’d come to loathe by February,”
― Lisa Genova, Still Alice

“Sobriety is okay enough,” Denny says, “but someday, I’d like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff. You know?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“But sometimes when you’re too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness. It’s not that either. He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway.”
― Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

“In the university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.”
― Zadie Smith, NW