“What's the matter?" asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.
"Why—why," said Elizabeth Ann, "I don't know what I am at all. If I'm second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?"
The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. "you aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in! And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“Not a thing had happened the way she had planned, no, not a single thing! But it seemed to her she had never been so happy in her life.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“I never did,' said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her. A dim notion was growing in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn't.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“It is possible that what stirred inside her head at that moment was her brain, waking up. She was nine years old, and she was in the third-A grade at school, but that was the first time she had ever had a whole thought of her very own. At home, Aunt Frances had always known exactly what she was doing, and had helped her over the hard places before she even knew they were there; and at school her teachers had been carefully trained to think faster than the scholars. Somebody had always been explaining things to Elizabeth Ann so carefully that she had never found out a single thing for herself before. This was a very small discovery, but it was her own.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“(P)ersonality...is perhaps the very most important thing in the world. Yet we know only one or two things about it. We know that anybody's personality is made up of the sum total of all the actions and thoughts and desires of his life. And we know that though there aren't any words or any figures in any languages to set down that sum total accurately, still it is one of the first things that everybody knows about anybody else. And that really is all we know!”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“I declare! Sometimes it seems to me that every time a new piece of machinery comes into the door some of our wits fly out the window!”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“This time Elizabeth Ann didn’t answer, because she herself didn’t know what the matter was. But I do, and I’ll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“Why, what’s the matter?” asked the teacher again. This time Elizabeth Ann didn’t answer, because she herself didn’t know what the matter was. But I do, and I’ll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up.”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“YOU aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in? And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Born place: in Lawrence, Kansas, The United States
Born date February 17, 1879
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“Any of these vultures smell weakness, and they’ll mess you up faster than sugar in a gas tank.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Supernaturalist
“The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour.”
― Victor J. Stenger, quote from God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
“I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.”
― Roland Merullo, quote from A Little Love Story
“All those years were now seeming like a betrayal of what she really was. While her body, her needs, her emotions–all of herself–had been turning like a sunflower after one man, all that time she had been holding in her hands something else, the something precious, offering it in vain to her husband, to her children, to everyone she knew–but it had never been taken, had not been noticed. But this thing she had offered, without knowing she was doing it, which had been ignored by herself and by everyone else, was what was real in her.” (page 140)”
― Doris Lessing, quote from The Summer Before the Dark
“Rommel could smell the sea. At Torbruk the heat and the dust and flies were as bad as they had been in the desert, but it was all made bearable by that occasional whiff of salty dampness in the faint breeze.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Key to Rebecca
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Diaries of Franz Kaf...
Mean Streak
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Looking for Salvatio...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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