Classmates Anime Quotes

Since I was in flight from religion, I assumed that my classmates had to be in flight from religion too, albeit in a quieter, savvier way than I had as yet been able to discover. Only today do I realize how mistaken I was. They were never in flight at all. Nor are their children in flight, or their grandchildren. By the time I reached by seventieth year, I used to predict, all the churches in the world would have been turned into barns or museums or potteries. But I was wrong. Behold, new churches spring up every day, all over the place, to say nothing of mosques. So Nietzsche's dictum needs to be amended: while it may be so that only the higher animals are capable of boredom, man proves himself highest of all by domesticating boredom, giving it a home.

I felt a downright fear of the mathematics class. The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn’t even know what numbers really were. They were not flowers, not animals, not fossils; they were nothing that could be imagined, mere quantities that resulted from counting. To my confusion these quantities were now represented by letters, which signified sounds, so that it became possible to hear them, so to speak. Oddly enough, my classmates could handle these things and found them self-evident. No one could tell me what numbers were, and I was unable even to formulate the question.

I was a country kid who went to a public school, and she was more of a middle-class girl who attended a private school. I was into hunting and fishing, and she liked drama and singing in the choir at school and church. Our lives up until that point were totally different. But Missy and I had a very deep spiritual connection, and I thought our mutual love for the Lord might be our biggest strength in sustaining our relationship. Even though Missy was so different from me, I found her world to be very interesting. Looking back, perhaps another reason I decided to give our relationship a chance was because of my aunt Jan’s bizarre premonition about Missy years earlier. My dad’s sister Jan had helped bring him to the Lord, and she taught the fourth grade at OCS. One of her students was Missy, and they went to church together at White’s Ferry Road Church. When I was a kid we attended a small church in the country, but occasionally we visited White’s Ferry with my aunt Jan and her husband. One Sunday, Missy walked by us as we were waiting in the pew. “Let me tell you something,” Jan told me as she pointed at me and then Missy. “That’s the girl you’re going to marry.” Missy was nine years old. To say that was one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard would be an understatement. I love my aunt Jan, but she has a lot in common with her brother Si. They talk a lot, are very animated, and even seem crazy at times. However, they love the Lord and have great hearts. I actually never thought about it again until she reminded me of that day once Missy and I started getting serious. Freaky? A bit. Bizarre? Definitely! Was she right? Absolutely, good call! Missy still isn’t sure what my aunt Jan saw in her. Missy: What did Jan see in me at nine years old? Well, you’ll have to ask her about that. She was the only teacher in my academic history from whom I ever received a smack. She announced a rule to the class one day that no one could touch anyone else’s possessions at any time (due to a recent rash of kids messing with other people’s stuff). The next day, I moved some papers around on one of my classmates’ desks before school, and he tattled on me. Because of her newly pronounced rule, she took me to the girls’ bathroom and gave me a whack on the rear. At the time, I certainly would have never thought she had picked me out to marry her nephew!

In his first class of the day, correlated language arts, a class for students at least two years below their grade level in English, Boobie Miles spent the period working on a short research paper that he called “The Wonderful Life of Zebras.” He thumbed through various basic encyclopedia entries on the zebra. He ogled at how fast they ran (“Damn, they travel thirty miles”) and was so captivated by a picture of a zebra giving birth that he showed it to a classmate (“Want to see it have a baby, man?”). By the end of the class, Boobie produced the following thesis paragraph: Zebras are one of the most unusual animals in the world today. The zebra has many different kind in it nature. The habitat of the zebra is in wide open plain. Many zebras have viris types of relatives. He then went on to algebra I, a course that the average college-bound student took in ninth grade and some took in eighth. Because of his status as a special needs student, Boobie hadn’t taken the course until his senior year. He was having difficulty with it and his average midway through the fall was 71. After lunch it was on to creative writing, where Boobie spent a few minutes playing with a purple plastic gargoyle-looking monster. He lifted the fingers of the monster so it could pick its nose, then stuck his own fingers into its mouth. There were five minutes of instruction that day; students spent the remaining fifty-odd minutes working on various stories they were writing. They pretty much could do what they wanted. Boobie wrote a little and also explained to two blond-haired girls what some rap terms meant, that “chillin’ to the strength,” for example, meant “like cool to the max.” Boobie enjoyed this class. It gave him an unfettered opportunity to express himself, and the teacher didn’t expect much from him. His whole purpose in life, she felt, was to be a football player. “That’s the only thing kids like that have going for them, is that physical strength,” she said.

Many articles speculate about Tom’s retreat from public life. He’s an organization helmed by committee, a criminal, a group of women. Much has been written about why he won’t permit interpretation of Parakeet. That he believes in time-capsule art, that he is a misogynist maestro. They’re all wrong. Baffled companies who want to produce this odd, violent heart of a play are not being held to the specifications of a playwright, but of a little girl. We were hypersensitive, sickly kids, constantly made fun of in school. Every day my classmates reminded me I was different though there was little chance I’d forget. They’d mark my out-loud face as if doing me a favor: Your eyebrows are joined, they’d say. Your calves are not shaped the way mine are. Your mother looks like an Arab spy. My mother demanded silence, but when we were together Tom and I were feral. One night, frustrated by our noise, she booted the door down and hurled handfuls of my stuffed animals into trash bags. Tom stood between her and them and widened his stance so he could not be moved. My mother backhanded him against the corner of a bureau.

Well, Doctor Dillamond seemed to think they were in questionable taste, given the Banns on Animals Mobility." "Doctor Dillamond, alas," said Madame Morrible, "is a doctor. He is not a poet. He is also a God, and I might ask you girls if we have ever had a great Goat sonneteer or balladeer? Alas, dear Miss Elphaba, Doctor Dillamond doesn't understand the poetic convention of irony. Would you like to define irony for the class, please?" "I don't believe I can, Madame." "Irony, some say, is the art of juxtaposing incongruous parts. One needs a knowing distance. Irony presupposes detachment, which, alas, in the case of Animal Rights, we may forgive Doctor Dillamond for being without." "So that phrase that he objected to - Animals should be seen and not heard - that was ironic?" continued Elphaba, studying her papers and not looking at Madame Morrible. Galinda and her classmates were enthralled, for it was clear that each of the females at opposite ends of the room would have enjoyed seeing the other crumble in a sudden attack of the spleen. "One could consider it in an ironic mode if one chose," said Madame Morrible. "How do you choose?" said Elphaba. "How impertinent!" said Madame Morrible. "Well, but I don't mean impertinence. I'm trying to learn. If you - if anyone - thought that statement was true, then it isn't in conflict with the boring bossy bit that preceded it. It's just argument and conclusion, and I don't see the irony." "You don't see much, Miss Elphaba," said Madame Morrible. "You must learn to put yourself in the shoes of someone wiser than you are, and look from that angle. To be stuck in ignorance, to be circumscribed by the walls of one's own modest acumen, well, it is very sad in one so young and bright." She spit out the last word, and it seemed to Galinda, somehow, a low comment on Elphaba's skin color, which today was indeed lustrous with the effort of public speaking. "But I was trying to put myself in the shoes of Doctor Dillamond," said Elphaba, almost whining, but not giving up. "In the case of poetic interpretation, I venture to suggest, it may indeed be true. Animal should not be heard," snapped Madame Morrible. "Do you mean that ironically?" said Elphaba, but she sat down with her hands over her face and did not look up again for the rest of the session.

People used to say Evie was weird, but she didn't care. She said she liked weird things." This professed love of the weird might go some way to explaining Evie's particular interests in the world of fauna and flora. Not for her the "obvious" choices like koalas and kangaroos; her favorite animals were monotremes. And while she loved the smells and sights of gums and banksias and wattles, it was the primeval expanse of the forest floor that excited her. Evie was mystified when her classmates spoke of magic and make-believe, and by the stories Reverend Lawson told in church on Sundays of water turning to wine and angels appearing to men. Why, she puzzled, did people seek refuge in such fantasies, when the natural world offered endless wonder? She delighted in entering the cool, dark realm of the bush after rain, searching through sopping leaf muck to discover that a whole new variety of fungi had sprouted overnight, an array of unimaginable shapes and sizes and colors waiting to be explored and catalogued.

To this day, I still cannot understand how Hitler got away with it. He transformed men and women into brutal animals without any sense of humanity. That is only one of the many things I still wonder about.

My classmates were looking down at me, and their eyes were glittering like those of animals in a dark forest. Then they started blinking, and one by one they disappeared, until all that was left was Reiko’s eye, staring down at me and emitting this laser beam of light, only it was the opposite of light, because it was cold and black and empty. It grew bigger and bigger, pressing down, enveloping me and the whole world and everything in it, and the only way I could save the world was to plunge my little kitchen knife right into the pupil, and so I did. I closed my eyes and stuck the knife into the dark hole, over and over again, until I felt something tear.