Esmé Raji Codell Quotes

“The difference between a beginning teacher and an experienced one is that the beginning teacher asks, "How am I doing?" and the experienced teacher asks, How are the children doing?”

“Sometimes a little song is sweet to hear, even if the orchestra is more accomplished”

“So much of teaching is sharing. Learning results in sharing, sharing results in change, change is learning. The only other job with so much sharing is parenting. That's probably why the two are so often confused.”

“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”

“Marry me, Esme. Please. Honor me. I will honor you as your husband never did. Our marriage would be a remedy against sin, if anyone could ever call it a sin to love you.”Sebastian Bonnington to Esme Rawlings”

“Reality, my strange and precious one. Reality is fabric. Fabric isreality. And your reality here is far easier to live with than where Iwas on the other side. So that’s why I don’t want to go back, andwhy you wouldn’t like it.”

“Laughter! I remember laughter. I did laughter a lot, he thought. These colours spinning around them are matching their mirth, changing from moment to moment, flaring out as they run and throw and catch. There are silver joy-waves rippling about them”

“I bet that dog-walking trollop called the cops on us. - Esme from Sister Mischief”

“All ethics and morals are culturally relative. And Esme's reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.”

“And Esme remembered in a rush--the wolfsong, the haunting, lyrical spirals of it in the dawn quiet and the feeling of euphoria that had attended it. Even in recollection the howling uplifted her like the crescendo at the end of a symphony and made her heartbeat quicken.”