Quotes from Nicholson Baker

I hadn't helped anybody learn anything, I'd just allowed them to be themselves; I was there for a day to ensure that room 18 didn't descend into utter chaos. My role was to function as straight man, to give these kids the pleasure of avoiding meaningless schoolwork. And that was maybe a useful role.

They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of 'ibid.'s' and 'compare's' and 'see's' that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind…

I don't want to be a substitute teacher who forces teenagers to shake hands with the dead. All they want to do is flirt and joke and get through the day.

For a full week after trying to reach the editor of The Atlantic, I occupied myself with other things. On October 31 I made some cheerful notes about Tracy Chapman's singing and about Bizet's Carmen. On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn't enough.

Ava was obviously observant, an enthusiast of spring: she'd seen the white frog and the two baby flies killed by the bus driver. And she was a better reader and speller than the others. I told her she could get a book to read, but she didn't want to do that, either. Instead, she got out her poetry notebook. Poor thing: she was already fed up with being asked to do inane worksheets and she was only in kindergarten. Twelve more years to go.

I was impressed by people like Les who had the bravery to brush their teeth (before lunch, even!) at work, since the act was so powerfully unbusinesslike;

Hazel wanted Mrs. Willett to help her with the spelling of teeth, but Mrs. Willett was, like many reading teachers, a believer in the primal importance of do-it-yourself phonetics, which supposedly built self-esteem and independent thinking habits—even when a kid was obviously eager to know what the real spelling was.

For some years I relied on suicidal thoughts to help me go to sleep.

Donkey Kong Pays Charlie Only Five Giant Strawberries

At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box—including the gold and silver crayons—and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons.

There were fearful consequences to the open tolerance of brutality: the depravity would "spread like an epidemic." Surprisingly quickly the like-minded and the deviant personalities come together, as is the case in Poland, in order to give full vent to their animalistic and pathological instincts. Eventually, Blaskowitz said, "only the brutal will rule.

one of the main things that school taught, I realized, was how to lie to get by.

I went with her to the dentist when she had her wisdom teeth out. Afterward she slept curled for a long time, a small beautiful person; there on her desk in a glass of water were the two enormous teeth. They were like the femurs of brontosauri. How those giant teeth could have fit into her head I don't know.

Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice and ashes.

Why isn't the pioneer of perforation chiseled into the façades of libraries, along with Locke, Franklin, and the standard bunch of French Encyclopedists?

I'm burning a bunch of little pinecones now that I gathered on the walk. One of the joys of life, I think, is trying to decipher the name on a gravestone as it is transmitted through the dense foliage of blue-green gravestone lichen. Some people clean off the grave-growths with chemicals and wire brushes, a mistake.

JOSEPH STALIN, the leader of Russia, ordered operatives to remove all the stores of food from farming towns in the Ukraine. Millions of people had no bread—they ate field mice, insects, husks, and dead children. It was 1933.

In every war," said Engelbrecht, "the armament maker who sells internationally is arming a potential enemy of his own country—and that, practically, if not legally, is treason.

This Home Depot employs several very small people, if I'm not mistaken, and they're usually the most knowledgeable. Go right for the bearded dwarf with the tool belt if you want the best advice.

I had a break from 8:26 to 9:13. I sat and breathed and thought of the way some people walk dogs. Some yank the leash to make the dog heel, and some let the dog smell the smells.

How was this helping these kids learn their times tables? All it was doing was rewarding the smart kids who already knew them. For the minority who didn't it was just another brief storm of shame.

What does poet laureate mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now.

It's special gum," she said. "Every time you chew, a woman in Estonia is having a singing orgasm.

So what he's saying is that the most natural state of being is not a state of being where you're enjoying the thing you're doing, it's when you're hoping for the next thing.