Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There’s no feeling on earth like it.
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it.
It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.
I do understand. I understand that you are offered a loveliness and you vomit on it, that you have the gift of love given you such as few men have ever known and you throw on it the acid of your pride, your ugly twisted sense of importance.
Great gifts are the fairest, and often the most dangerous, fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break.
For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.
Every day is a gift, Jake. Of course sometimes it’s a really horrible gift that you don’t want.
Do not be afraid; our fate. Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.
