Julia Kudelina

“To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.10

10 One has only to spend a term trying to teach college literature to realize that the quickest way to kill an author's vitality for potential readers is to present that author ahead of his time as "great" or "classic." Because then the author becomes for the students like medicine or vegetables, something the authorities have declared "good for them" that they "ought to like," at which point the students' nictitating membranes come down, and everyone just goes through the requisite motions of criticism and paper-writing without feeling one real or relevant thing. It's like removing all oxygen from the room before trying to start a fire.”
― David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

“For the advice in a joke is sometimes more useful than the most serious teaching.”
― Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom

“In God's eyes, a man who teaches one truth and nothing else is more righteous than a man who teaches a million truths and one lie.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Students never appreciate their teachers while they are learning. It is only later, when they know more of the world, that they understand how indebted they are to those who instructed them. Good teachers expect no praise or love from the young. They wait for it, and in time, it comes.”
― Darren Shan, Vampire Mountain