From an old notebook

And he got inside and he got out. And he goes back. And the people are there now. And all the balloons come all around and all the colors. And the boy was so happy. And the ones flew away and two twins have two red coats and they have balloons and then they popped it. And now he got it now. And he was under it. And he was holding the strings. And then he goes up to the sky. And then the boy was a string.

Ben, four years old, narrating The Red Balloon.

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“The speaker buys an apple and stuffs a rotten spot in it with rat pellets.”

Jonathan Holden, in The Fate of American Poetry .

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The teacher’s seriousness is supported by the proximity of other serious teachers, just as the seriousness of the student is nourished by the presence of other serious students. . . . The maintenance of intellectual integrity is not only a matter of strength of character, but it is also a function of the immediate environment of the teacher. . . . Consciences reinforce each other in intellectual matters as well as in others.

Edward Shils, The Academic Ethic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Also from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang