Lucifer with a Book Quotes

“He relished learning from the voice of a teacher and from books. Each day of merely learning something was a deep adventure to him. Sometimes he laughed and told himself that he was unnatural, for American boys are supposed to hate school. They followed a pattern of Redblooded Masculinity, set up by the traditions of hookey and Mark Twain. But he had no resistance whatever to his studies. He took them supine and with gusto, with the receptively of a girl whose desires have been aroused by loving blandishment.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book

“Education, boy, is not something to prepare you for life. That is a vulgar American error.… It's something to take you out of life.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book

“O yes...Look, you and I, and millions of others are living in the most wonderful country, the most horrible country the world has yet seen. Most of us know very little about its tradition, in spite of the shouting about American history that goes on in most schools. And all the saluting of the flag.... Most of us, sadly enough, really aren't interested in our country. As a matter of fact, you may write this down as a first and dominant quality of Americans. When nothing gets in their way, they're possessed of a kind of amiable madness. We've so much freedom that, in the process of acquiring and maintaining it, we've seen fit to throw over every tradition, every link with the past. In many ways this American chaos is a good thing. But we do go sliding cheerily through the fourth dimension. Perhaps God laughs at us for our arrogance. For we've given up every check except political opportunism and a zeal for what is blasphemously called the Almighty Dollar. Yes, my friends, whatever is right for the moment is okay with us Americans.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book

“He knew instinctively the cardinal function of a teacher – which is a stout lever to raw mass.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book

“[T]he important thing was that each Saturday they must win games and put The Academy on the sporting pages. For that, after all, was the final index to the rating of an American school.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book

“The war had made him into a lone wolf, an introverted arrow that shot silent and solitary to his target for the moment. He'd become an opportunist of sensation and aesthetic.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book

“She saw why teachers get very old and stay very young. For there is no closer probing of the mind--not even in psychoanalysis.”
― John Horne Burns, Lucifer with a Book