Quotes from Robert Coles

We all need empty hours in our lives or we will have no time to create or dream.

Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.

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.

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?

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.

Where you read a book and when you read and with whom (as your fellow readers) can make a big difference!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

She like history . . . and wished the English teacher would ask the class to read history books. Instead the teacher was 'always' assigning poems.

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.