Jeffrey Howard

“Everyone who has ever been to school knows that school is prison, but almost nobody beyond school age says it is. It's not polite. We all tiptoe around the truth because admitting it would make us seem cruel and would point a finger at well-intentioned people doing what they believe to be essential. . . . A prison, according to the common, general definition, is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. In school, as in adult prisons, the inmates are told exactly what they must do and are punished for failure to comply. Actually, students in school must spend more time doing exactly what they are told than is true of adults in penal institutions. Another difference, of course, is that we put adults in prison because they have committed a crime, while we put children in school because of their age.”
― Peter O. Gray, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life

“I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life