"The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun."

“In Memory of Those Who Died Waiting for the Bell”

“With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know.”

“We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it.”

“I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.”

“Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.”

“One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them.”