The Call Of Stories Quotes

“Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“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.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“Novels and stories are renderings of life; they cannot only keep us company, but admonish us, point us in new directions, or give us the courage to stay a given course. They can offer us kinsmen, kinswomen, comrades, advisors — offer us other eyes through which we might see ... Every...student...will all too quickly be beyond schooling, will be out there making a living and, too, just plain living — that is, trying to find and offer to others the affection and love that give purpose to our time spent here....[Characters] can be cautionary figures...who give us pause and help us in the private moments when we try to find our own bearings”
― Robert Coles, M.D., The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“...ambitious intelligence [is] a force that can demolish the 'heart's reasons' — namely, a warm empathy, a considerateness toward others, a willingness, even, to let them become one's teachers, however humble or troubled their lives.”
― Robert Coles, M.D., The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“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.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“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.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“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.”
― Robert Coles, The Call Of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination – A Study of How Listening Promotes Learning and Self-Discovery

“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)”
― Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination