Quotes from Bel Kaufman

Your blouse is whitening on the chair and your parrot Flaubert weeps in French: she left him, and he is sorry.

An Emergency Tea was called.

Maybe you don't want divorce?" Varya asked slowly. "Maybe you only talk, talk, talk divorce?" "Oh, mother," Nancy-Anastasia said. "Aha!" Varya pointed a finger at her daughter. "Na vore shapka goreet! Means: on thief . . ." "On a thief the hat burns," I said.

I haven't seen her since. I wrote to her a few times, not really expecting an answer, for—as she often used to say—the tongue is longer than the pen and can lead you straight to Kiev.

Trouble is," Paul smiled his most charming smile, "a teacher has to be so many things at the same time: actor, policeman, scholar, jailer, parent, inspector, referee, friend, psychiatrist, accountant, judge and jury, guide and mentor, wielder of minds, keeper of records, and grand master of the Delaney Book.

He was taking off his tie, the dreadful tie with the green mermaid on it. "It's your tie, Sam—I hate it! Why must you always . . ." I'm not saying it right, she thought, not any of it.

Why are we quarreling about a tie? flashed through her mind; at the same time, as if propelled by a force outside of herself, she tore it from his hand and flung it furiously into the wastebasket.

Sam had a child's faith in the healing power of the morning, she thought later, as she lay sleepless at his side; he believed that a good night's sleep could iron out all the accumulated wrinkles of the day. She resented his ability to fall asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow while she tossed restlessly in bed; his even breathing was an affront to her wakefulness.

When her mother saw Andrea, she took her hand in hers and sobbed: "We're orphans now!" It struck Andrea as false, somehow—the tear-stained face, the trite words.

And you fixed it?" "I think so. I had a long talk with her this morning. But you see, my approach had to be oblique. She would have ignored my platitudes and resented my advice. There was only one way to show her how happy she really is—and that was to make her feel sorry for me.

She hesitated, searching in her scant vocabulary of taken for granted health the precise word to convey the inchoate distress, the alien sense of something gone wrong.

As soon as you enter," he said, "I know. Tout de suite I know. You are tigresse." She smiled her slow smile. This was better; the man had something after all.

In one of Chekhov's short stories, a little boy is drawing a picture. His father asks him why the man in the picture is taller than the house. "If he were smaller," says the child reasonably, "you couldn't see his eyes." ENTRY:

She touched his sleeve, drawing her hand away at once, as if burned by the contact, but with practiced subtlety.

Happy? It was a word she had been fond of using when she was young. But it meant one thing at eighteen, another at thirty-two. Its only test was contrast with unhappiness.

I've been a good mother," she said. It was a plea rather than an affirmation.

To the young ones she would say bravely that her husband did not love her (how piquant an unloved wife, if she is beautiful), but that she could never, never hurt him.

The past still had its future.

But I am busiest outside of my teaching classes. Do you know any other business or profession where highly-skilled specialists are required to tally numbers, alphabetize cards, put notices into mailboxes, and patrol the lunchroom?

Many of us, her mind repeated, walking with vague symptoms, breathing fear. So many of us who, through love, have a stake in life.

It was only after her marriage that she had learned to create the illusion of beauty, which is, perhaps, more difficult to achieve than beauty itself.

She hoped the examination would not take too long because she had to take Patty to her art class, shop for tonight's dinner, and fix the hem of Patty's new dress for her sixth birthday party next week.

That sense of power was all she craved.

Stripped of her calculated clothes and the careful camouflage of her make-up she was tired, unalluring, middle-aged. And that was something she would never admit to herself, for most of the illusion of beauty is the conviction of beauty.