A Quote by Maeve Binchy
When I was teaching Latin in girls' schools before I became a writer, I didn't much like it if parents would come in and say, 'We'll have less of the Ovid and Virgil and more of the grammar, please.' After all, I was the one in charge. That's how I feel about doctors. You should trust them to do their job properly.
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I'm 64, but I act like I'm still 12. I go to schools. At colleges, they come out in droves, they almost scare me. I think it's just to see if I'm still alive. After I work them out - and it's not easy - I sit them down and we have a serious talk. Are they eating? Working on their body? I can say things parents won't say. No matter where I go, I talk to each one individually after I teach. They tell me things like, 'I'm starving, guys like girls thinner.' I give them concrete advice about self-image and self-worth.
How is the soul profited by the strife of Hector, the arguments of Plato, the poems of Virgil, or the elegies of Ovid, who, with others like them, are now gnashing their teeth in the prison of the infernal Babylon, under the cruet tyranny of Pluto?
There should be regulation that prevents all schools, not just state schools, from teaching creationism because it is indoctrination, it is planting ideas into children's heads. We should be teaching children to be much more open-minded.
All the poets are indebted more or less to those who have gone before them; even Homer's originality has been questioned, and Virgil owes almost as much to Theocritus, in his Pastorals, as to Homer, in his Heroics; and if our own countryman, Milton, has soared above both Homer and Virgil, it is because he has stolen some feathers from their wings.
I feel very grateful. I wasn't raised with money. My parents were schoolteachers; I was raised on a small farm. It never dawned on me that I would have a job that someone would pay me to do. Much less a job like this. It would be ridiculous if I had any complaints about it. And look - I've had the opportunity to learn an entirely new set of skills, and I'm bringing them to the work I'm doing now in filmmaking.
Now people are much more receptive because they can just go online and just Google your name and make sure you're not, you know, psycho. But, before, I think lot of opportunities were missed by a lot of girls. Also parents! The girls would go home and would say, "Oh, you know, I was just scouted." And the parents were, like, "You're not going to be a prostitute."
Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.
Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican.
A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week.
Four- and five-year-olds' play is permeated with the rankest sexism. No matter what their parents do and say, they play their momand pop roles in ultraconventional style. We've seen little girls whose mothers are doctors absolutely refuse to take the doctors' parts in their play, insisting that "only boys can be doctors," against all reason. Girls do more washing and drying of clothes, dishes, and babies than they've ever seen their own mothers do, and they turn their play husbands into TV-watching drones who do nothing but talk about money.
My sister, myself, and my cousins would put on shows for our parents and charge them to come and watch, apparently. That's what I'm told. My parents said I knew how to milk it.
I would say how important it is that we stop teaching kids, from the beginning, that boys are more important than girls. It's the 21st century, you know, let's go here. We have to show kids that boys and girls share the sandbox equally and do equally interesting things. We're teaching kids something that we have to try to get rid of later on. Why not just stop filling them with unconscious gender bias?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Never trust anyone who tells you how people come to trust them.
Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be.
I've been typecast. People don't want to take a risk or a chance. Quite a few times they've come up to me and say "We want you to do that Russian accent." And I'll be like, "How about if I do an Irish accent or a South African accent," and they don't trust that you can properly pull them off.
We should figure out how to do this so that some parents don't feel disenfranchised, angry and upset. It says a lot about the state of where we are in the city, the role of parents and the reality of small school and combining schools.
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