Martin Wilson’s What They Always Tell Us hears the voices of the young as they struggle toward adulthood...
Humor is anger that was sent to finishing school.
I read because one of these days I’m going to get out of this town, and I’m going to go everywhere and meet everybody, and I want to be ready.
Anyone who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city.
The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized.
That meant I could come back whenever I could manage it. And she was telling me to go. She knew the decision was too big a load for me to carry by myself. She knew me through and through. She had eyes in the back of her heart.
Stay away from people who don’t know who they are but want you to be just like them. People who’ll want to label you. People who’ll try to write their fears on your face.
Why she hankered to be a teacher, I couldn’t tell you. But she had chalk dust in her veins, and she deserved to get that certificate. It was only fair.
We’d gotten him wrong. He wasn’t a dunce. He was an artist. According to these pages, he’d seen us all a good deal clearer than we’d ever seen him.
I don’t think grandma’s a very good influence on us.
The sobs came then, faster than she could swallow. A teacher dares not cry, not a real teacher.
We thought he was weird. He thought we were weird. It was great. It was what multiculturalism ought to be” -Archer.
A Seth Thomas steeple clock stood on a high shelf. When it struck ten, Grandma jerked awake. She looked around the room astonished. It was her belief that she never slept, not even in bed.
So there is some justice in this world, though not a lot.
I am here to help her learn,” Tansy said, “not to keep her from it.
Never worry about a book corrupting a child. Worry if your children are not getting ideas from books.
Then a lady flounced up and perched on the seat opposite. She had a full bird on the wing sewn to the crown of her hat, and she was painted up like a circus pony, so we took her to be from Chicago.
We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We’d heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there’s enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We’d go to their fair, but we weren’t going to drink their water.
Hayseeds we might be, but we meant to be informed hayseeds.
But later when I was a teacher, an English teacher naturally, my students preferred fiction to reality. They were in junior high, and so they preferred ANYTHING to reality.
Aunt Agnes said, “It’s hard to make a good Christian out of a cat.