theserenityreader > theserenityreader's Quotes

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,” he said. He was always better with words than I.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
"Go," she says. "He waits for you."

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“We reached for each other, and I thought of how many nights I had lain awake loving him in silence.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places.”
― john holt, Learning All the Time

“The myth that if you don't start early, you might as well not start, tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The music-making world that young people confront reminds me a lot of the world of school sports. After a lot of weeding out, in the end you've got a varsity with a few performers and an awful lot of people on the sidelines thinking, "Gee, it's too bad I wasn't good enough." We need to be careful about that. There seems to be an unspoken idea, in instruction of the young, that the people who start the fastest will go the farthest. But that's not only an unproven theory; it's not even a tested theory. The assumption that the steeper the learning curve, the higher it will go, is also unfounded. If we did things a little differently, we might find out that people whose learning curves were much slower might later on go up just as high or higher.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time

“Learning is not the product of teaching.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time

“Figuring out what you don't know or aren't sure of is the greatest intellectual skill of all.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time

“What children need to get ready for reading is exposure to a lot of print. Not pictures, but print. They need to bathe their eyes in print, as when smaller they bathe their ears in talk.”
― John Holt, Learning All The Time

“Young people want, need, and like to read books that have meaning for them, and that when such books are put within easy reach they will sooner or later figure out, without being taught and with only minimal outside help, how to read them.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time

“This is my objection to books about "Teach Your Baby This" and "Teach Your Baby That." They are very likely to destroy children's belief that they can find things out for themselves, and to make them think instead that they can only find things out from others.”
― John Holt, Learning All The Time

“In other words, start with what you know, and use a little guesswork, or common sense, or whatever you want to call it, to figure out what you don't know.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time

“When you're not sure which of two or three methods to use, then try all of them on a simple problem and see which one gives you the answer that you know is right.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time

“What we do in our lives and our work is greatly infuenced by metaphors-the pictures we have in our minds about how the world works or ought to work. Often these images are more real to us than reality itself.”
― John Holt, Learning All the Time