David Foster Wallace Quotes

Punctuation, is? fun!

And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I've been smart longer.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc.

In teaching it is the method and not the content that is the message.

Method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it most effective in use. Never is method something outside of the material.

You've got a chemistry class; I want a piece of your mind; You don't know what you started when you mixed it up with mine.

Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn. The real teacher, in fact, lets nothing else be learned than learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by "learning" we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information.

He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

Fun for me is to take what I learn and teach others in a way that is accessible and applicable in their own lives.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

Like most lazy upper-middle-class kids, American Studies seemed like a fun way to use your knowledge of TV to get an A.

A young professor I watched in action at one of our large eastern colleges used to stand with his back to the class and mumble explanations of blackboard problems. He was "let out" at the end of two years because students refused to attend his classes. He was given an evasive reason for his dismissal and he left with justifiable bitterness toward the administration. If someone had told him the truth he could have avoided this denouement. Sometimes professors go on for years without any conception of remediable faults which irritate their listeners.

You can't find me 20 children in Chicago, I don't care which section you go in - you can be on Michigan Avenue or here - and they won't be able to tell you that y is a vowel when it's the final syllable in a word, as in Nancy and icy. And no one bothers to teach the rules anymore - "i before e except after c."

No matter what any of the grammar teachers say, punctuation is an arbitrary matter. It should be used to make sentences clear.

What the teacher is, is more important than what he teaches.

The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.

After the Dance was my first attempt at nonfiction. I'd never really participated in carnival, and I really wanted to go. It sounded like a wonderfully fun thing to do. And I wanted to write something happy about Haiti, something celebratory. And going to carnival gave me a chance to do that, because it is one of the instances in Haiti when people shed their class separation and come together.

I look forward to teaching the occasional class, 'cause I was a professor. And I had fun doing it.

The correct way to punctuate a sentence that states: "Of course it is none of my business, but -- " is to place a period after the word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period. Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.

Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.

The rule is: don’t use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

I think classes can be the most fun. And if you want to make it a social thing and you want to go with friends, then that's the way to do it.

I do really well in science, but I just don't like it. It's boring to me. My favorite class is probably Spanish - it's fun all around.